The clean tech start-up has raised £2.4m to fund expansion plans and roll out its portable solar sculptures.
"With this new funding, we want to scale our business and maximise the disruptive potential of our ultra-thin and lightweight solar solutions by facilitating a new generation of solar users ready to have a positive impact on the planet."
The pre-seed round was led by Sparkmind and will fund platform development and European expansion.
"At Vygo, we believe that every human deserves a world-class education and that social experience is at the core of impactful learning. The Vygo platform gives every learner a social education community filled with their peers, mentors, tutors, advisors and other supporters. With Vygo, education institutions are able to reinvent their social support ecosystem online and ultimately improve their student outcomes whilst scaling their impact. We were delighted to work with AIN to find amazing investors and individuals through a well-streamlined process."
The funding will support the development of a second-generation safety device and team growth.
"We saw an opportunity to keep staff safe at the start of the pandemic and will continue to do this as we move out of it. Workplace health and safety is having a huge cultural shift at present. The world is becoming proactive to safety procedures rather than upholding the reactive norm and businesses want to be prepared for the dangers that are on the horizon. SpaceBands protects staff and keeps businesses’ doors open at a price point that is currently unrivalled in the market. We will be opening our round publicly on CrowdCube in Q1 2022 and releasing our second generation product. We are very excited about what the future holds for our company."
Members of Henley Business Angels have backed Babbu in its latest funding round.
"We are delighted to have closed this investment and be supported on our mission to make a real difference, by focusing on our youngest children. It is well documented that experiences in early childhood are often the root cause of today’s hardest social challenges such as addiction, family breakdown, poor mental health, suicide and homelessness. We believe we can have a truly transformational impact on society."
The seed round was led by Merus Capital with participation from APX, Techstars, Verissimo, and angel investors.
"training latest deep learning models accurately on very small data sets, which any local, low-resource language usually suffers from, is a very challenging task because models are usually designed to perform well in English with terabytes of available text and speech data but not in languages with a few hundred megabytes of data."