The funding round was led by Episode 1 to support key senior hires and community expansion.
"The work of data scientists is especially important in the area of finance, where a single slip in rationality can lead to a devastating effect on the value of an investment portfolio. Algorithms don’t feel the emotional strain of a declining portfolio value, or make flawed decisions tainted by innate human biases. As a result, algorithmic decision making in financial markets has grown explosively in recent times."
The initial investment from Henley Business Angels will support sales and product development.
"Lord Baker and the team are thrilled to have received this strong vote of confidence at the beginning of the fundraise. It will enable us to build out the platform and help thousands more students connect with top employers from an early age, helping transform futures and solve the STEM skills shortage."
Maven Capital Partners, North East Development Capital Fund, and the Finance Durham Fund led the follow-on investment.
"Car insurance is becoming increasingly expensive, particularly for young people, and honcho's proposition will provide a fun, engaging and more cost-efficient way of purchasing insurance products via its unique reverse auction marketplace model."
Midven backed the HR tech platform to help fund the development of its new payroll system.
"Over the last three to five years, we’ve noticed a shift in where payroll sits in terms of responsibility. Increasingly HR is becoming responsible for managing payroll rather than finance and ensuring details are not only accurately provided when an employee joins but accurately maintained when circumstances shift during their time as an employee. Many organisations face the challenge of running these two systems in isolation, which causes risk and complexity. At its worst, this can result in employees being paid the wrong salaries into the wrong bank accounts or even businesses continuing to pay employees once they have left the business. Being able to respond to the growing demands of our clients is thanks to the funding we received from Midven. It is clear that eliminating the risk of payroll related mishaps, as well as having a central system on which data can be added, edited and managed – and one system that speaks to all departments involved – was very much in demand. Whilst some other software platforms offer the ‘add-on’ of payroll, this is very often a third-party system with a different interface and, if they are lucky, a synchronisation process running in the background but this still presents interface and usability challenges. Ours is fully integrated and designed by our team of developers who devised our original HR management software from scratch with the same simple and logical look and feel as Natural HR meaning no new interfaces to learn and an employee is only added, changed or removed once whilst still integrating fully with your approval processes! We recognise not all HR professionals are ‘finance trained’ so we’ve ensured the function is accessible and straightforward."
SuperSeed has led a £600k seed round in artificial intelligence start up SuccessData to support team expansion and international growth.
"We are delighted to have experienced such strong customer traction, and to have been able to close this round with SuperSeed as the lead investor. They bring real life hands-on experience in building enterprise software companies and we are really looking forward to having the team advise us on strategy and future objectives."