The Bristol team of YFM Equity Partners have taken over managing the South West Ventures Fund through a newly formed independent venture capital fund manager, Technology Venture Partners.
The South West Ventures Fund was established as one of the UK’s nine Regional Venture Capital Funds to invest up to £2m of risk capital into high growth small businesses. The fund is now fully invested and the portfolio includes Dynmark, a cloud based mobile intelligence and messaging platform and Micrima, which has developed innovative technology for breast cancer screening based on radiowaves instead of X-rays.
The spin-out will see the South West Ventures Fund continue to be managed by the three founding partners of Technology Venture Partners, Peter Davies, Nick Simmonds and Julian Dennard. Technology Venture Partners will focus on investing in emerging UK technology companies.
Commenting, David Hall, Managing Director at YFM Equity Partners LLP said: “We wish Peter, Nick and Julian much success with their new venture firm. We will continue to invest in established fast growing businesses in the South-West by investing from our institutional and British Smaller Companies VCT funds by deploying resources from our London office.”
YFM Equity Partners is focused on making private equity investments of up to £10m from its institutional and VCT funds. It recently invested in the £10m management buyout of Intelligent Office, a business outsourcing specialist for the legal market, and made a 2x return on its exit from Fishawack, a medical communications company. In 2011, it invested £4.5m of development capital into Swindon headquartered Poweroasis, a specialist telecommunications business.
Peter Davies, partner at Technology Venture Partners said:
“South West Ventures Fund has shown considerable portfolio revenue growth and we continue to see good opportunities to invest venture capital in the UK technology sector. We intend to build on this experience, helping innovative and high growth technology businesses fulfil their growth potential”
About Technology Venture Partners
Technology Venture Partners is venture capital firm investing in emerging technology companies in the South of the UK. TVP invests across a broad range of technology sectors including enterprise and infrastructure software, communications and networking, electronics, advanced materials, medical technology and healthcare IT. TVP portfolio companies include Atlas Genetics (point of care DNA based diagnostics for infectious diseases), Symetrica (radiation detection for security applications), Micrima (radiowave based imaging for breast cancer detection) and Dynmark (cloud based mobile messaging and analytics). Several of the TVP portfolio companies were originally spinouts from leading universities and research institutions located in the South of the UK.