Balderton Capital led the £5m round with a £3.8m investment to support domestic and international growth.
"We’re delighted to secure growth finance from such a renowned VC who will undoubtedly add tremendous value both strategically and operationally. We’ve built a pioneering and award-winning service over the last few years. This investment, alongside the crowd, puts us in an even stronger position to provide essential growth finance for businesses and inspire a new generation of investors."
The seed round was cornerstoned by a £125k investment from Angels in the City and London Business Angels syndicate members.
"Our team founded BreakBad to change the way we understand, measure and influence our health from tracking symptomatic metrics like calories and kilos to the causal metrics that drive our behaviour. We needed the funds to hire the talent required to embark on this exciting journey and pitched at Angels in the City. Huge thanks to Kayar Raghavan our lead investor and Andrew Dancer our board member who helped with fund raising and strategy respectively. The Angels in the City process was seamless and in less than 2 months, we have the funds and team to embark on this exciting journey."
The food business raised £1m from 283 investors via Crowdcube in less than 36 hours.
"We’re thrilled that the River Cottage Bond was so well received by investors. I am a huge advocate of crowdfunding and this new innovation from Crowdcube helps reduce the cost and complexity of raising finance and provides an effective way for more established brands, like River Cottage, to raise growth funding without the banks."
— Rob Love, Co-founder and Joint Managing Director
The investment was backed by Midven through its Early Advantage fund.
"In addition to the venture capital backing, Midven also brings advice and experience to help us grow the organisation to the next level. We have already undertaken a number of changes as a result of this relationship and have a clear vision of where we want to get to, how we’re going to get there and we now have the funding in place to be able to do so."
