Weekly Soak 🧼 27 Jan 2025

The definitive round-up of venture capital fundraising news | 🇬🇧 edition

Jesse Heasman
January 27, 2025

On your bike: Forest raises a £13m Series B to launch new e-bike models

Welcome if you’re new to Weekly Soak by Soapbox - the newsletter that covers every funding round announced in the last 7 days.

Soapbox helps founders and companies - whatever stage, sector or surrounding hype - publish a golden source of their fundraise online in a digestible format for onward sharing.

And allows the rest of us - whether we’re future investors, hires or clients - to catch-up on the latest venture stories in a simple feed and newsletter without the usual clickbait or paywall.

NEW If you thought “Weekly Soak” wasn’t cheesy enough we’ve launched our first Quarterly Wash which unpacks the various trends captured in the platform over the last 3 months. By attempting to cover all news we hope the data will be pretty representative of what’s happened. Highlights include:

📊 UK startups raised £2.3bn in funding across 181 rounds in Q4 2024

💰 Over 500 investments were made by 386 unique VC investors

🔄 Mercia Ventures was the most active investor with 9 deals announced

🌱 Series A rounds captured the most investment with £490m deployed to the stage

🏙️ 60% of companies were based in London with the city taking >80% of all investment

Last week £200m was deployed across 14 rounds. Catch up below ⤵️

<£0.5m

Recfindr raises £300k pre-seed from SFC to transform recruitment for fast-growth industries

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Pre-seed ⚙️ Recruitment

Adclear secures £500k in pre-seed funding to enhance AI-driven marketing compliance solutions

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Pre-seed ⚙️ Regulation

£0.5 ➡️ 1m

Egregious lands £800k pre-seed from Fuel Ventures and Oxford Capital to combat AI-driven superhuman deception

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Pre-seed ⚙️ Cybersecurity

£1 ➡️ 2m

Vizgard secures £1.5m to enhance defence and public safety using visual autonomy AI solution

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Funding ⚙️ Defence

Keyless secures £1.6m in follow-on funding for its privacy-preserving biometric authentication solution

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Follow-on ⚙️ Cybersecurity

£2 ➡️ 5m

Mojo-CX raises £2m led by Praetura to scale AI-powered contact centre analytics

🌎 Manchester, United Kingdom 📈 Funding ⚙️ Contact centre

Aslan secures £3.9m seed round from Notion to make employee pay flexible

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Seed ⚙️ Finance

Infinity secures £5m debt facility from CIBC for its call tracking and conversation analytics platform

🌎 Milton Keynes, United Kingdom 📈 Venture debt ⚙️ Contact centre

£5 ➡️ 10m

StormHarvester raises £8.4m in Series A funding led by YFM to deliver AI analytics for wastewater utilities

🌎 Belfast, United Kingdom 📈 Series A ⚙️ Infrastructure

£10 ➡️ 20m

Forest secures £13m in Series B funding to expand its operations and launch new e-bike models

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Series B ⚙️ Micromobility

£20 ➡️ 50m

Amplience secures £32m in debt funding from AshGrove Capital to expand headless content management solutions

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Venture debt ⚙️ Ecommerce

Vertice raises £40m Series C led by Lakestar to simplify procurement through its spend optimisation platform

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Series C ⚙️ Procurement

Fundment raises a £45m Series C led by Highland Europe to expand its tech platform for financial advisers

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Series C ⚙️ Wealth

Lindus Health raises a £45m Series B led by Balderton to transform the clinical trial landscape

🌎 London, United Kingdom 📈 Series B ⚙️ Biotechnology

😲 Have we missed a round? Get in touch at [email protected]

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