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Dec 22

BRAN Investments Investor Event

By Newsletters

On the 1st December BRAN Investments held their inaugural Investor Event at The NED in London, hosting 50+ guests on the evening.

This was a first such event for BRAN Investments in bringing together like-minded investors and our portfolio companies to network, as well as being an occasion to celebrate 5-years of BRAN Investments being an investor into early-stage growth impact ventures.

There was a great buzz in the room with lots of networking between Investors and BRAN Investments portfolio companies, as well as talks from a number of guest speakers. The Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA) provided a fascinating overview of the current Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), noting the benefits to investors and the positive impact on the UK economy; as well as an overview of proposed changes to take effect in April 2023. Dan Morris and Scott Sinfield from the portfolio company Arrive shared their experiences of starting and growing the company, including the recent sale of their in-house start-up Found. And finally, there were inspiring talks from the Goyal Family on the creation and future of BRAN Investments by Ashish and Ram Goyal.  The photo below is of the whole BRAN Investments team enjoying time together.

We aim to host a number of similar Investor Events in going forward, which includes a next such event on the 2nd February 2023.  This event will be the culmination of the Accelerator Challenge programme that we are taking forward with the charity Allia, with the finalists of the programme pitching to investors as part of their current funding rounds.  More details of this event and programme can be found in the dedicated Allia Accelerator Challenge Update News article on our website, of which do get in touch with myself for more details of this and if you are interested in attending our future events.

Dec 22

Allia Accelerator Challenge

By Newsletters

Since our last newsletter in July, we have been busy working with the inspiring team at Allia on a dedicated investment programme. 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.

We are pleased to inform you that after the return from the Summer Holidays, a dedicated Accelerator Challenge programme was agreed and launched to market for early stage social impact ventures looking to raise their first / next investment round.

During September and October a call for such ventures resulted in over 40+ applications, of which it was a difficult challenge selecting the finalists given the quality of applications received.

On the 14th November 2022, 12 impact venture finalists were inaugurated into the programme.  This kick started the formal business support offering in the programme, made up of workshops and 1-2-1 sessions, helping the ventures to progress their business plans and become the famous investor ready!  Workshops undertaken so far include: (i) Challenging the Business Model; (ii) Financial Narrative & Due Diligence; (iii) Product, Growth & Roadmap; (iv) and of course a Pitch Practice!  The 1-2-1 sessions have been held with an Allia team member coach and Martin Carruthers from BRAN Investments.

We are delighted to inform you that the 12 finalists that we will be supporting over time are:

  • Beanbag Health – providing accessible, high quality and evidence informed support for all eating disorders and reducing inpatient admissions.
  • In Good Company – a dedicated platform to help you find the best ethical and for-good local businesses and experiences around you.
  • Mind Data – a digital platform simplifying the way therapists run their business, whilst transforming the therapy experience for their clients.
  • The Nature Impact – building the future nature related intelligence, supporting governments and organisations to understand and mitigate their nature-related impacts.
  • Snack Gusto – an award winning ethical focused company that uses farm rejected fruits to produce delicious snacks that are healthy alternatives to the general snack market, all the while reducing food waste and improving consumer wellbeing.
  • SuperFi – empowering the ‘financially squeezed’; helping them to locate, manage and reduce their debts faster.
  • Telmi – a podcast creation app for kids to create mini podcasts independently, in a meaningful and safe way to unleash kids’ creativity to boost kids’ curiosity, confidence and oral communication.
  • Well Fruited – the first LiquidFruit drink that nutritionally replicates eating a piece of fruit, which reduces the sugar impact and captures nutrients that are only found in the fruit.
  • Plant Nourish – delivering personalised ethnicity and disease-specific solutions so that no matter who you are, what you earn or where you live, you have access to the best, most innovative care available globally today.
  • New Wave Biotech – addressing the sustainability of the food industry and food security, by developing technology to help animal-free proteins scale and reach price parity with animal-derived products.
  • Circular 11 – transforming plastic pollution into a material solution. They take plastic that doesn’t get recycled and turn it into low-carbon building products that are designed to last a lifetime.
  • Lylo – promoting water efficiency by offering products that find new and innovative ways to reuse water.

The culmination of this programme is an Investor Demo Day on the 2nd February 2023 (4-9pm), with the chance for the finalists to pitch to a number of investors as part of their current fund-raising rounds.  After the return from the Christmas holiday period, we will therefore be working with the finalists to complete business plans and perfect their pitch for the Investor Demo Day!

More details on the Investor Demo Day can be found HERE and we will be making pro-active contact with investors whereby we believe such ventures may be of interest.  Please do also register your interest for such an event at hello@alliaimpact.co.uk

Dec 22

Biff’s Kitchen Investment

By Newsletters

We are thrilled to announce that in September 2022, BRAN Investments became an investor into Biff’s.  Biff’s is a veg-led vegan comfort food brand, led by an award-winning management team, that have gained significant traction within the first few years of launch.

Biff’s has created an innovative range of street food-inspired products using jackfruit as its primary ingredient, offering and ‘naturally naughty’ alternative to traditional gluten and pea-based alt-meats. Its flagship product is Europe’s first commercially available vegan wing with a sugarcane “bone”.  The range also includes burgers, loaded fries and sauces.

Initially starting out in London’s vibrant street food scene, with a mission ‘to make plants taste out of this world, so we can stay in it’, Biff’s early success saw them tour the UK’s biggest festivals and open locations in Shoreditch’s Boxpark, as well as collaborating to create BrewDog’s only fully vegan bar. After scaling their production capabilities in late 2019, Biff’s branded products have gone on to appear on the menus of 1000s of foodservice providers across the UK and Scandinavia, including restaurant chain Frankie & Benny’s and Greene King pubs, and are also available via Deliveroo and Uber Eats through their delivery-only kitchens.

As a unique offering in the plant-based market, Biff’s entered UK supermarket’s in 2022.  The Biff’s Plant Shack range launched several products into around 300 Waitrose stores across the country. Sainsbury’s was next to launch in September 2022, launching several of its products in around 405 stores across the UK.  With the UK plant-based market seeing huge growth and currently worth over £3billion, this puts the company in a strong position to capitalise and expand.

Our investment coincided with the company also raising investment from the Greater London Investment Fund, providing sufficient capital for the company to capitalise on short term opportunities in retail and beyond.  This will lead to the company being in a strong trading position before undertaking a larger fund raise during 2023, to undertake further commercialisation plans.

Commenting on the investment, Ashish Goyal said “There is an ever-increasing awareness of the impact our food choices have on the environment.  Biff’s have created a unique product and brand to have a significant impact on the growing vegan products market.  The team have created a unique street food themed brand with multiple routes to market already secured.  This positions the company well for their future expansion and we are excited to be an investor at this time, helping them to realise their ambitions for the brand.  Importantly the food tastes amazing and we are excited to see new products being brought to market in due course”

 

Dec 22

Arrive sell their in-house start up Found

By Newsletters

The BRAN Investments portfolio company Arrive are celebrating the sale of their in-house developed product and start-up ‘Found’.

Arrive is a design and innovation agency for brands that want to play an important role in people’s changing lives.  Arrive work with founders, leaders and organisations who share their belief in the power of design and innovation and who are working to have a positive impact in the world.

In 2019 Arrive themselves took on an innovative product design project called Found.  The project was to develop a pioneering Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for the Care Sector given that research had identified that Care Homes were struggling in that:

  • 68% of all care enquiries aren’t responded to by Care Homes.
  • 64% of digital enquiries weren’t responded to within 48 hours.
  • Shockingly, 92% of enquiries weren’t followed up within a 7-day period.

Arrive undertook the whole product design and development process in-house. Arrive report that it has been quite the adventure since the launch in 2019. Tough decisions, mistakes and breakthroughs, and lots of hard work – but a whole lot of fun, too! Found now captures more than 10,000 enquiries each month and its partners have converted between 50-70% more of their enquiries.  This has made Found relied upon by some of the UK’s best care companies to connect quicker with care seekers and improve their overall customer experience.

Given the unique service offering and traction in the market, Arrive were approached with acquisition offers for Found.  In the Summer of 2022, Arrive identified the care platform Lottie as an ideal acquirer of which a full acquisition of the service was agreed. This merger allows Lottie to leverage the pioneering CRM software. With it, care home managers gain more oversight on what’s happening and can better manage, prepare and strategies operations. It gives oversight on live bed availability, and the ability to respond to queries and track what’s going on. Its software can help care homes improve compliance, sales, and most importantly the standard of care provided.

From strategy and creative to product and service innovation, Found is not only a success story but a perfect example of the breadth of Arrive’s capabilities.  More information on the Found acquisition can be found at London-based Lottie acquires Found to confront the social care crisis and enhance the quality of elderly care | EU-Startups and the services available from Arrive can be found at Arrive – Design & Innovation for changing lives (arrivecreate.com)

Jul 26

Investing in Women Code – BRAN Investments is now a signatory

By 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.

Jul 26

An introduction to a BRAN Investments Partner – Allia

By Announcements

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/

Jul 26

New Investment made into Shwap Technologies Ltd, trading as OWNI

By Announcements

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!

Jul 26

Follow on investment made into Loopcycle Ltd

By Announcements

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/

Apr 22

An introduction to a BRAN Investments Co-Investor – Sustainable Ventures

By Announcements

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

Apr 22

Portfolio company introduction – Cogo

By Announcements

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.