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Beringea UK raises record £64m for ProVen VCTs

£39m raised for ProVen VCT and £25m for ProVen Growth & Income VCT in the second largest venture capital trust fundraise of 2019

Beringea has announced that it has raised a combined total of £64m for the ProVen VCTs in the tax year ended 5 April 2019. This represents the largest ever total raised by Beringea’s UK funds in a tax year, with £39m raised for ProVen VCT and £25m for ProVen Growth & Income VCT. The share offer remains open for subscriptions in the current tax year.

The funds secured also rank as the second largest amount raised by any VCT manager in the tax year ended 5 April 2019. They will enable Beringea to build on its track record of successfully backing rapidly scaling businesses in industries ranging from retail to digital media, fintech and software-as-a-service.

In the past six months, Beringea has strengthened its portfolio in the UK through investing in Exonar, a leading data discovery and cyber security company, AccessPay, a rapidly growing fintech company specialising in corporate payments, and Festicket, the world’s largest portal for music festival experiences.

Alongside these new additions to the portfolio, Beringea has provided further backing to a number of its existing investments. This included participating in funding rounds for Firefly, one of the UK’s leading educational technology providers, and Zoovu, an artificial intelligence company that builds digital assistants for the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, and Canon. Beringea also led a £2.4m round of investment in DeepCrawl, a leading web crawler and marketing insights platform.

Beringea and the ProVen VCTs also announced the launch of a dedicated presence in the North of England in January. The Manchester office, led by Marc Shirman, former co-head of Muzinich & Co.’s UK private capital fund, will enable the funds to tap into the rapid expansion of the digital economy in the North of England and Scotland. Analysis by Tech Nation found that the turnover of digital businesses in Manchester alone reached £3.2bn in 2018.

Stuart Veale, Managing Partner of Beringea, commented: “The success of this year’s fundraise is testament to the strength of our track record since the foundation of the ProVen VCTs nearly two decades ago. The sales of Watchfinder and Chargemaster in 2018 provided further evidence of this track record, returning close to £40m to the ProVen VCTs.

“We have continued to build on this momentum in 2019 with a series of influential investments in rapidly emerging industries such as fintech and artificial intelligence. This fundraise will enable us to provide further backing to these investments, capitalise on our expansion into the North, and back the rise of a generation of entrepreneurial success stories throughout the UK and Europe.”

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