NPIF - Maven Equity Finance and Catapult Ventures, alongside new Manchester Tech Trust angel group, invest £700,000 in Biorelate

Manchester-based technology platform createsinnovative solution fordata curation in biomedicine

NPIF - Maven Equity Finance, managed by Maven Capital Partners (“Maven”) and part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, has invested £200,000as part of a £700,000 funding round inBiorelate, a technology platform using artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently curate data in biomedicine.

Existing investors, Catapult Ventures via the Greater Manchester and Cheshire Life Sciences Fund,provided £150,000andthe Manchester Tech Trust Angels (“MTTA”) provided £350,000. The funding will be used toexpand the team, and to develop its product offering, includingthree new SaaS products.

Founded in 2014, Biorelate uses existing knowledgeto help scientists solve difficult biomedical challenges, enabling smarter and faster research anddevelopment.The company’s technology uses AI to curate dataand informationthat’s relevant to biomedical conceptsfrom published literature such as journals, patents and clinical trials.

Historically, data curation in this space has faced challenges, as the primary means of communicating knowledge and scientific developments arethrough publishedjournal articles. In this format, data is difficult to curate as information and knowledge is unstructured and expansive. As a result, as much as 80% of all knowledge published is unused and unavailable in curated databases. This is a problem for scientists and companies attempting to advance the current state of ‘truths’, as they are effectively not leveraging all of the informationavailable to them.

Biorelate’stechnology combines natural language processing and AI with human expert curation to generate highly relevant output from unstructured big data. Uses of Biorelate’s technology include curation and exploration of unused sources of knowledge of molecular mechanisms for drug discovery,tracking specific biomedical developments, expertise sourcing and competitive intelligence.

The business was founded by Daniel Jamieson while completing hisPhD at the University of Manchesterafter successfully prototyping a highly efficient and accurate method of disease curation. Its potential was first demonstrated in building the world’s biggestpublicly available database of pain molecular mechanisms and has since formed the basis of ongoing discovery work.The business is experiencing strong demand for its services, including a recent collaboration deal signed with an AIM listed drug-discovery specialist.

As CEO, Jamiesonhas a background in biology and bioinformatics and is supported by a highly skilled and dedicated senior management team. Ernst Kretschmann, CTO, started his career at the European Bioinformatics Institute and has performed a range of development and management roles for finance organisations such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley andHSBC. Nathan Day of MTTA joins the board as a Non-Executive Director.

Bioinformatics and drug discovery informatics are two core vertical markets that align well with Biorelate’s main market focus. While the competitive landscape within biomedicine & early stage drug discovery is diverse, the opportunity exists for Biorelate to combine a first-class user experience with specialist AI technology-driven biomedical knowledge curation.

NPIF - Maven Equity Financehas, since its launch, invested £12 million in dynamic growth businesses across the Northern Powerhouse region, driving economic prosperity and supporting the creation of over 200 jobs. Maven works with five Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and Combined Authorities in the North West to invest between £50,000 and £2 million to support the growth of innovative and ambitious businesses across a wide range of sectors and in a variety of funding scenarios.

Gavin Bell, Investment Manager at Maven, said: “We’ve been impressed withBiorelate’s ability to generate growing demand from quality customers, in a short space of time. We can see the advantagesof leveraging Biorelate’s technology, to derive bespoke data-driven insights from the vast array of published biomedical information. We are very much looking forward to working with Dan and the team through the next stage of their journey.”

Dr Daniel Jamieson, CEO at Biorelate said: “We are building a technology platform to extract more value from data in science texts, 80% of which is unused. Our initial focus is in working with companies in the very early stages of drug discovery to help them make better use of this data on the path to producing viable new treatments. I’m absolutely thrilled to have Maven and the MTTA on board for this journey and to have the amazing Catapult Ventures team commit further.”

Dr Gareth King, Life Science Partner at Catapult Ventures, said: “We were very pleased to provide seed investment to Biorelate in 2016 from the GM&C Life Sciences Fund and are delighted that Dan has over-achieved his milestones and our expectations. Dan has attracted a highly experienced and successful team to join Biorelate, developed the technology building on revenue generating projects and validated the business model. We are excited to join Maven and Manchester Technology Trust Angels to provide further investment and to support the company’s ambitions to become a leader in the curation of Biomedical knowledge.

Grant Peggie, Director atBritish Business Bank said: “ Greater Manchester has a thriving healthcare sector, with state-of-the-art facilities available that enable the development and testing of new drugs and technologies. Biorelate has the potential to tap into the huge market both in the UK and overseas and provide innovative solutions that will support other businesses in the biomedicine space.”

Peter Lusty, CEO at Manchester Tech Trust, said: “We have known Dan for some time and were delighted to provide a substantial proportion of the investment in his latest round. Biorelate appealed to our angels because it has highly innovative technology that solves problems in a complex and mature industry.This is the first of, hopefully, many investments for Manchester Tech Trust Angels, a group that we have been nurturing for just over a year. We look forward to raising our profile over the coming monthsas weintroducenew tech angels to the group and find similarly exciting companies who can benefit from our members’ investment and expertise.”

The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund project is supported financially by the European Union using funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020 and the European Investment Bank.

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Notes to Editors

About Maven Capital Partners UK LLP

Maven Capital Partners UK LLP (Maven) is a lower-mid cap private equity house focused on the provision of growth capital and mezzanine finance to SMEs across the UK. It is one of the most active private equity fund managers in the country, managing over £415 million of assets for a variety of client funds, including Venture Capital Trusts, UK regional debt and equity funds, and Maven Investor Partners – a syndicate of institutional, family office and experienced investors.

Headquartered in Glasgow, and with ten other offices throughout the UK, Maven has nationwide coverage of the market for SME finance and is introduced to around 400 deals per year through 40 regionally based investment executives. With over 70 staff and partners, Maven executes a range of private company transactions, offers hands-on proactive portfolio management to investee companies and provides a fully integrated back-office support function to client and third party fund managers. Since 2009 Maven has invested over £347 million in SMEs across the UK.

For more information about Maven visit: www.mavencp.com and funds.mavencp.com/npif

About The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund

• The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund will invest in Microfinance, Business Loans and Equity Finance sub-funds which will offer financing ranging from £25,000 to £2m, specifically to help small and medium sized businesses secure the funding they need for growth and development.
• The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund is operated by British Business Financial Services Limited, wholly owned by British Business Bank, the UK’s national economic development bank. Established in November 2014, its mission is to make finance markets for smaller businesses work more effectively, enabling those businesses to prosper, grow and build UK economic activity.
• The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund is supported by the European Regional Development Fund, the European Investment Bank, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and British Business Finance Limited, a British Business Bank group company.
• The NPIF covers the following LEP areas: Tees Valley Combined Authority, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Warrington, Cumbria, Liverpool City Region, Lancashire, Humber, Leeds City Region, Sheffield City Region, York, North Yorkshire and East Riding.
• The project is receiving up to £140,359,192 of funding from the England European Regional Development Fund as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020. The Department for Communities and Local Government is the Managing Authority for European Regional Development Fund. Established by the European Union, the European Regional Development Fund helps local areas stimulate their economic development by investing in projects which will support innovation, businesses, create jobs and local community regenerations. For more information visit https://www.gov.uk/european-growth-funding.
• The funds in which Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund invests are open to businesses with material operations, or planning to open material operations, in, Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West and Tees Valley.
• The British Business Bank has published the Business Finance Guide (in partnership with the ICAEW, and a further 21 business and finance organisations). The guide, which impartially sets out the range finance options available to businesses and provides links to support available at a regional level, is available at www.thebusinessfinanceguide.co.uk/bbb

About GM&C Life Sciences Fund

Managed by Catapult Ventures, the GM&C Life Sciences Fund is a seed and early stage venture capital fund targeting life sciences businesses located in the Greater Manchester and Cheshire & Warrington region.

The Fund is the result of a collaboration between Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Cheshire East Council, and Manchester Science Partnerships and can be invested in ‘Life Science’ businesses across the following sectors:

• Pharmaceuticals
• Biotechnology
• Diagnostics
• Life Science contract research organisations (CRO)
• Healthcare technologies
• Medical devices

With contributions from both private and public-sector partners, the size of the Fund, at launch, is around £31m. Full details can be found at: www.gmclifesciencesfund.com

About Catapult Ventures

Catapult Ventures is an independent venture capital fund manager that has been investing in UK businesses since 2002. Catapult’s owners have operated discrete funds on behalf of public and private sector investors totalling c. £130m, including the GM&C Life Sciences Fund.

Since 2015 Catapult has recorded 11 profitable exits averaging 3.9x money multiple, including Accutronics (9.1x), Lumora (4.7x), Oxford Cryosystems (5.2x), Systems Integration (4.9x), Monica Healthcare (3.6x), BWB Consulting (3.2x*), Hangar7 (3x), Haemostatix (3x*) and Stagecoach (2x). [*expected]

Catapult Ventures and Catapult Ventures Group are trading names of Catapult Ultimate Holdings Ltd, which is the ultimate holding company of Catapult Venture Managers Ltd, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

About Manchester Tech Trust

Manchester Tech Trust is an independent charity that supports economic development, research and education across the tech sector in Greater Manchester.We passionately believethat Manchester is a great place for science and tech and, through our workstreams, we connect start-up companies to mentors, and other useful resources. We are greatly assisted by our talented supporters in a wide range of industries and organisations, many of whom feature in our Tech Trust Network http://www.manchestertechtrust.com/tech-trust-network

Founded in 2015, we realised very early on that access to early stage investment for start-up businesses was a challenge in Greater Manchester and the NW. In particular, there was a shortage of visible, tech savvy angel investors. This is why we have established and support the Manchester Tech Trust Angels and look forward to developing this part of our activities as a logical and much needed extension to our mentoring and related support work.

For more information about Manchester Tech Trust visit www.manchestertechtrust.com or contact peter.lusty@manchestertechtrust.comtel:07798792990.