Beringea, a transatlantic venture capital firm, has raised a combined total of £64m for ProVen VCTs in the tax year ending 5^th April 2019.

These funds let the firm build on its existing track record of successfully backing rapidly scaling businesses in industries from retail, digital media, fintech and software-as-a-service.

The funding is made up of £39m raised for ProVen VCT and £25m for ProVen Growth and Income VCT. The share offer remains open for subscription in the current tax year.

It’s the largest amount raised by Beringea’s UK funds in a tax year and the second-largest amount raised by any VCT manager in the tax year ending 5^th April 2019.

Bolstering the portfolio

In the past six months, Beringea has strengthened its portfolio in the UK by investing in:

• Exonar, a leading data discovery and cyber security company
• AccessPay, a rapidly-growing fintech company specialising in corporate payments
• Festicket, the world’s largest portal for music festival experiences

Alongside these new additions, Beringea has put further backing into some of its existing investments, including funding rounds for:

• Firefly, one of the leading educational technology providers
• Zoovu, an artificial intelligence company that builds digital assistants for Microsoft, Amazon and Canon

Beringea also led a £2.4m round of investment in DeepCrawl, a leading web crawler and marketing insights platform.

The firm and ProVen VCTs announced the launch of a dedicated presence in the North of England in January.

Stuart Veale, managing partner of Beringea, said: “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.

“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.”

Further reading on venture capital trusts

• Case for diversity in venture capital strengthens