Micrima, the Bristol-based breast imaging company, has raised £4.4 million in additional equity funding led by Technology Venture Founders, The Angel CoFund (ACF), and Venture Founders plus a group of returning and new individual investors. This brings the total amount raised by Micrima to £10.7m.

Roy Johnson, Micrima’s Executive Chairman, said, “I am very happy to announce the completion of our latest funding round, which provides us with the capital we need to move our initial MARIA product into full commercial launch and follow this swiftly with the enhanced functionality that the system is capable of achieving. The market has been prepared over the past 18 months through the publication of our historical clinical trial data, and attendance at numerous congresses and trade shows to showcase our breakthrough technology. As a result, we have many influential clinicians and partners anticipating the launch of MARIA later this year. We look forward to putting the product we have worked so hard to create into their hands for the first time.”

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dotdigital Group Plc (AIM:DOTD), the leading provider of intuitive software as a service (“SaaS”) and managed services to digital marketing professionals, through the ‘dotmailer’ platform, announces that it has completed the acquisition of the COMAPI group of companies. COMAPI (the trading name for Dynmark), a fast-growing business focused on the omni-channel messaging and cloud communication market, has been acquired for a cash consideration of £11 million.

Headquartered in Cheltenham with approximately 30 employees, COMAPI has built a scalable software platform that allows businesses to communicate with their consumers across multiple conversational messaging channels including the growing market for live chat. Comapi’s heavy investment in technology allows it to compete in the CPaaS (communication platform as a service) and ARN markets (alerts, reminders and notification), providing a flexible API (application programming interface) based omni-channel messaging platform and toolkit that facilitates easy integration and rapid deployment to businesses requiring a personalised and two-way customer engagement solution.

COMAPI is a successful brand with strong growth and revenues within the CPaaS market and, with dotdigital’s full support, will continue to work directly with its customers, which include Gap, eBay, TSB, British Airways, Carphone Warehouse and Collect Plus. dotmailer and COMAPI already have numerous shared clients which include Superdry, Hayes Recruitment, Daisy Group and betting giant Ladbrokes.

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Financing global launch and menu development of Atlas Genetics’ io® molecular testing system

Atlas Genetics Ltd., the ultra-rapid Point-Of-Care (POC) molecular diagnostics company, today announces completion of its Series D financing, raising $35 million from a syndicate including all Series C Investors and one new investor, Wondfo Biotech.

Development of the Atlas Genetics io® system has been completed with the successful CE marking of the Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) test announced in February 2016.  This new Series D equity issue will finance the clinical trials and commercial launch of a second test, for detection of both Chlamydia and Gonorrhoea, planned for regulatory approvals in the US around the end of 2017, as well as further development of additional diagnostics menu.  The financing also provides funding to expand cartridge manufacturing capacity at Bespak, Atlas Genetics’ cartridge manufacturing partner.

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Micrima, the Bristol-based breast imaging company and developer of a ground-breaking and CE Mark approved radiowave breast imaging system, has successfully closed on a new financing round of £2.6m. The new funding will support accelerated development of its patented MARIA technology, which aims to enable breast screening to become safer, more comfortable and more accessible to a larger proportion of the global female population. The company intends to start the commercialisation of its first system towards the end of this year.

“Breast cancer is the most common cause of death in women between the ages of 35 and 55 in Europe and the leading cause of death for women in many countries. The problem is that many tumours are not discovered early enough, largely due to the difficulty in discriminating between cancers and dense tissue using current imaging technology,” said Roy Johnson, Micrima’s Executive Chairman. “Using harmless radiowaves, the MARIA imaging system is capable of detecting tumours in dense tissue and allows routine and repeated scanning without any of the safety or comfort concerns associated with x-ray mammography. The process takes less than five minutes and avoids painful breast compression.”

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TVP portfolio company, Covalent Software, has been acquired by Ideagen Plc, the UK AIM listed provider of information management software to regulated industries.

For Covalent the deal provides significant future growth opportunities in its core financial and public services markets as well as opportunities for the enlarged group to expand its governance, risk and compliance (GRC) presence in healthcare, local government, finance and banking.

The deal marks a successful exit for Covalent’s previous funders. TVP’s Nick Simmonds said: “It has been a pleasure working with Peter McHugh and the team at Covalent Software and we are delighted with the way in which Covalent has developed into a technology leader in the GRC space.  We wish the company every success for the future.”

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