Announcements

We are pleased to announce that BRAN Investments Ltd has recently been added as a signatory to the UK Government’s Investing in Women Code.

A diverse and inclusive business ecosystem is good for customers, entrepreneurs, businesses, investors, and society as a whole. The Investing in Women Code is a commitment to support the advancement of female entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom by improving female entrepreneurs’ access to tools, resources and finance from the financial services sector. The Investing in Women Code recognises that there is already valuable work underway by individual organisations to help women who are seeking to start or scale up their businesses. Signatories to the Investing in Women Code aim to build on this ongoing work.

As a signatory to the Investing in Women Code, BRAN Investments is committed to a culture of inclusion and to advance access to capital for female entrepreneurs. As a signatory, BRAN Investments has a commitment to:

• having a nominated member of the senior leadership team who is responsible for supporting equality in all its interactions with entrepreneurs.
• providing HM Treasury, or a relevant industry body designated by HM Treasury, a commonly agreed set of data concerning: all-female-led businesses; mixed-gender-led businesses and all-male-led businesses. BRAN Investments agrees that HM Treasury will collate this data and publish it on an aggregated and anonymised basis in an annual report.
• adopting internal practices which aim to improve the potential for female entrepreneurs to successfully access the tools, resources, investment and finance they need to build and grow their businesses, working with relevant players in the ecosystem. BRAN Investments will review these actions annually and make this commitment publicly available.

The Investing In Women Code is an important initiative for us at BRAN Investments.  This will build on our work to date that shows in July 2022, the portfolio of companies is 41% female founded or has a female co-founded management team.

Signing up to the Investing in Women Code is part of our vision in having a diverse and inclusive portfolio of companies, including founders who are racially-minoritised, disabled, LGBTQ+ or from financially-disadvantaged backgrounds for example.  We are at this time shareholders in the Black Young Professional network and will continually look to support initiatives and programmes delivering inclusion. Do make contact with us if you would like to discuss a specific initiative or programme.

More details on the Investing in Women Code and to be able to see a full list of signatories, please visit Investing in Women Code – GOV.UK – more details on our future participation in the code will be contained in future News articles.

Allia is a charity that has been at the forefront of impact innovation since 1999, with initiatives across the UK that include housing, cleantech and social innovation.

Allia has helped hundreds of start-ups, small businesses and impact ventures to develop and scale, enabling significant regional employment opportunities, transforming communities and creating positive impact for people, place and planet.  Allia’s social finance solutions have raised £ millions to help charitable organisations with their development and impact aims.

Allia can help support through a range of ways. From its Future Business Centres that support local business communities; its support programmes that help entrepreneurs and ventures to grow their ideas and businesses; and through advising and arranging responsible finance for responsible businesses.  Impressively, by its 20th anniversary in 2019, Allia had:

• Helped 2,099 businesses to start up, thrive and grow, creating new innovations & businesses.
• Helped to create 4,969 jobs from these ventures growing, plus from other employment programmes & grants.
• Arranged £554m in finance to help registered charities, enterprises and sustainable businesses.

We first met Allia in late 2021 and have enjoyed our interaction with the various teams, which includes sharing prospective investment opportunities, attending pitch events and even being a judge at Allia’s recent Climate Accelerator Demo Day.  We are working with Allia on ideas for future collaborations together, so be sure to watch this space for any future news announcements here, as well as being happy to promote their range of services to small businesses.

More details on the activities of Allia can be found at allia.org.uk/about-us/ and further details of its business support programmes, such as the Climate Accelerator, are here futurebusinesscentre.co.uk/our-programmes/

As consumers become increasingly aware of the environmental impacts of consumer goods industries, they are opting to buy second hand more regularly.  This is particularly true of the fashion industry, where resale is expected to grow 11% faster than the broader fashion retail sector by 2025.

The untapped potential of the second-hand market in the UK exists in the £10billion worth of clothing sitting unused in customers wardrobes.  With growing customer demand for second hand fashion, a readily available inventory in products already sold, and the growing regulatory pressure to reduce carbon emissions, fashion retailers are looking for ways to adapt their business models for the future. OWNI has created a solution to enable fashion and lifestyle brands to enter the secondary market and manage the lifespan impact of the products they sell.

OWNI enables retailers to reap the benefits of resale – revenue generation and secondary market access without incurring any costly or challenging operations. OWNI integrates with fashion brands to automate product listings into OWNI users accounts.  Users can then make products available for resale with a click of a button, preventing the need for manual uploads. OWNI tracks products sold on their platform and shares the insights with brands.

OWNI has launched its Minimal Viable Product and integrated 13 brands into their platform, with more than 87 brands on their waitlist.  2,000 users have joined OWNI and more than 500 transactions have occurred on their platform.

OWNI is led by Kalkidan Legesse (CEO) and Vidmantas Markevicius (CFO) who are also co-founders of Sancho’s, a sustainable fashion & ethical gift department shop. Kalkidan was awarded Draper’s Magazine 30 Under 30 in 2021 and winner of independent shop of the year by Holly & Co, and Vidmantas is a Santander UK Award winning entrepreneur.  It was clear when we first engaged with the founders that they both had a passion for sustainable fashion, looking to create a unique solution in the resale market for both retailers and consumers alike.  With impressive early traction with brands onboarded and exciting go to market plans, BRAN Investments concluded an investment into the company in April 2022.

We invested alongside our good friends at Sustainable Ventures, with the investment round completed by several others including the Dixon Foundation and a number of Business Angels, totalling £300,000 in pre-seed investment. This has provided OWNI with a sound early seed funding round that will allow the company to expand its software development and marketing teams. OWNI will also further develop new features for its peer-to-peer platform and expand the functionalities for its retail partners. The raise will also naturally help to increase the marketing efforts of its product.

You can find out more information about OWNI here: https://www.owni.app and we are excited for the future plans in store for the company.  Sign up at OWNI today!

We are pleased to announce a second investment into the existing BRAN Investments portfolio company Loopcycle.

Loopcycle is a digital platform that embeds industrial-scale product traceability, redefining the management, recovery and resale of valuable commercial equipment.

Embedding lasting product traceability at the point of manufacture and resale by assigning a unique product ID, called ‘Cyclecode’, allows users to track product provenance with their smart device.

Loopcycle unlocks the circular and commercial value for its users to foster long-term customer relationships, extend the product lifecycle and improve circularity within the supply chain.

Loopcycle’s Co-Founder and CEO Lugano Kapembwa comes from a strong corporate sustainability management background and Chandan Rajah (Co-Founder and CTO) has an extensive experience in technology, with a previous exit from a start-up of his own.

What initially drew us to the Loopcycle propsotion was the ability to target the buy and replace culture, especially connected to white goods, so empowering all to reduce the volume of product that ends up in landfill.  We have been impressed by the speed at which the team have taken forward the key product development features, as well as customer validation and pipeline that has been generated over the past 12-months.

One year on, the Loopcycle platform traces over 400 products, the team is 6 members strong, and the company have secured key pilots with the likes of Electrolux Professional and NHS Trusts.  Having started in the Commercial Kitchen Equipment sector, Loopcycle aims to expand into IT hardware, automotive components, household electricals and other recoverable B2C goods.

If you have any interest in such sectors and are interested to learn more, contact me for an introduction to such a company.  More details on Loopcycle can be found at loopcycle.io/

Sustainable Ventures is the home of climate tech.

Sustainable Ventures has been scaling sustainable business ventures since 2011 and have a passion for sustainable innovation for a net-zero future.

Sustainable Ventures has created Europe’s largest climate tech ecosystem, offering shared workspace, commercialisation services and investment to entrepreneurs to help accelerate their growth and Sustainable Ventures is on a mission to help develop 1,000 sustainable start-ups by 2025. To date Sustainable Ventures has:

• Invested in 32 early-stage ventures across a range of sustainability sectors.
• Opened 4 shared workspaces, housing over 100 climate tech businesses – further expansion of the flagship site at County Hall, London is underway that will triple the floorspace managed.
• Provided commercialisation support to over 300 ventures across the UK, leveraging their network of industry experts.

Investment has been focused on the pre-seed stage to date, with investees benefiting from an intensive 12-month programme of growth support. This not only helps to increase the survival rate of investees, with only 1 of the 32 investments having failed, but also adds significant value to entrepreneurs – the portfolio data shows that Sustainable Ventures is achieving an average valuation uplift of 2.7x to the next funding round (vs. market average of c1.5x). Sustainable Ventures is also in the early stages of raising a new Seed/ Series A fund to help support pipeline companies as their capital needs grow.

BRAN Investments first co-invested with Sustainable Ventures in March & April 2021 in two ventures, Loopcycle and BIOPHILICA, who you will learn more on in future Newsletter editions.  We have also just completed an investment into a third company with Sustainable Ventures, Owni (shwap.uk), of which we will be releasing more details of such an investment in due course.

We look forward to continuing this relationship into the future with Sustainable Ventures, of which more details on them for you can be found at: Sustainable Ventures

At the recent Cop26 Glasgow Climate Change Conference, nations took a range of decisions in the collective effort to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

This was welcomed by all and in particular by our portfolio company Cogo, who have identified that many of us want to live more sustainably but our actions don’t often align with our values.

Cogo is on a mission to empower hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses world-wide to become conscious consumers by taking action to measure, reduce and compensate for their impact on the world. Cogo enables everyone to join together to create a fairer and more sustainable world.

Cogo’s Good Impact Framework helps millions of customers understand the impact of their spending, but Cogo recognises that information alone is not enough to lead to actual sustainable behaviour change.

That is why Cogo developed API and App solutions, which are powered by world-leading sustainability data and behavioural science. They are delivered either directly, or via corporates, to the consumer/businesses end-user.

Cogo have established growth partnerships in the Financial Services sector in NZ, Australia and the UK, with an “in progress” pipeline in other markets to reach 500m end-users.  In the UK, NatWest has integrated the API into their retail bank App and Santander promote a co-branded version of the D2C Cogo app to their retail customers.

BRAN Investments are proud to have made an investment into Cogo in the summer of 2018, having been impressed by the passion and drive of the Founder Ben Gleisner | LinkedIn in wanting to create systemic positive impact.

In the proceeding 4-years, Cogo have gone on to raise an additional $10m to continue their quest for positive impact and are empowering millions of consumers around the world to have a positive impact.  As per Cogo’s motto, Let’s go change the world!

More details on the Cogo product offering for both consumers and businesses can be found at Cogo.

We believe that social and environmental challenges need to be overcome with better entrepreneurial solutions. It has also become clearer over the last 5-years since we were founded that there is a growing demand for new businesses to deliver impact and that diverse teams deliver better performance, impact, and returns.

BRAN Investments funds ambitious and diverse founders who are on a mission to bring unique products and services to the market for scalable positive impact.   Our desire is that these products and services help tackle social and environmental issues that will fundamentally change the world for the better, and for all of us.

And we believe in leading by example.

Our principles and values guide the way we work. Fairness, honesty, ambition and graft are the values that built the Goyal businesses and we are strong advocates of diversity and inclusion and are ourselves involved in a number of social impact projects including the creation of a Foundation and a project that we founded to help to tackle loneliness.

We have shaped the BRAN Investments portfolio across three key verticals being:

1. Health and social care
2. Technology with social impact
3. Ethical and vegan produce

Whilst this sector is an important consideration currently, the right mix of people, passion and plans is equally important for us.

Investments in numbers – some interesting stats

• 5 years of experience and a track record of building an early-stage venture portfolio through an investment of circa £2m to date
• 28 for good / impact live trading ventures in the portfolio
• A diversified portfolio across B2B SaaS, Direct to Consumer, Marketplaces, Consumer Goods and Services, as well as Restaurant offerings
• £61m of follow-on investment raised by our portfolio companies
• One early exit achieved – Bloombox Club UK who were acquired by Canadian Listed PlantX Life Inc in November 2020 for a cash sum and common shares
• 43% of our portfolio companies have a female Founder / Co-Founder

BRAN Investments is a family founded company formed by Beena, Ram, Ashish and Nisha Goyal whose own multiple business successes inspired them to want to help other start-up companies of like-minded people, to achieve the same success.

With 40 years of combined experience in business and property, the family, operating as BRAN Investments, offer direct funding and provide access to capital along with their own expertise and a large network of knowledgeable commercial contacts to help new and promising ventures achieve more.

Why do they do it?

Founded in early 2017 and with their vast experience in building businesses and a property portfolio, the Goyal Family saw banks become reluctant lenders.  Hearing of numerous great ideas and well-run businesses who were unable to win the financial backing they needed to grow, they realised BRAN Investments could help. Once they had identified the problem, they joined others in the UK SME investment market to help provide a solution.

If we fast forward 5-years, BRAN Investments has made a total of 35 unique early-stage equity investments so far.  This has included co-investment with several well-respected early stage and venture capital funders in the UK eco-system.

Who do they invest in? 

Start up companies who have the same values as they do – fairness, honesty, ambition and sheer graft!   Why do they do it?  Because they are dedicated to helping passionate people achieve the same real business success as they have.

Who am I?

My name is Martin Carruthers, and I have been lucky to be a part of that growth and have contributed to additional success having joined BRAN Investments in November 2020.  My role has been to support the existing portfolio of companies and to assist the family in making further investments which help new and promising ventures achieve more.  You will see more on the investment ethos of the Family in the next section.

Through this newsletter you will also learn more about the BRAN Investment portfolio companies who have enjoyed investment opportunities and company growth, plus new sectors of interest for us going forward, some new investment announcements and more about the good people we work with.

Welcome to the world of BRAN Investments!