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HERmesa

Venture Capital

Portfolio

8

companies

Investment by month

By category

  • BioTech£4.5M
  • Uncategorised£3.4M
  • SaaS£3.2M
  • RecruTech£2.3M
  • CleanTech£1.2M
  • Other£1.6M

By location

  • London£8.1M
  • Bristol£4.5M
  • United Kingdom£3.6M

Portfolio companies

A

Auralytica

Auralytica develops holographic hydrogel sensors that make food spoilage visible in real time.

CC

Carbon Cell

Carbon Cell manufactures a plastic-free foam material derived from biochar.

D

Deployed

Deployed provides software for writing project scopes.

E

EnsiliTech

EnsiliTech develops room temperature stabilisation technology for vaccines and biologics.

Flexa

Flexa

Flexa provides a transparent platform that connects job seekers with verified flexible employers.

FC

Flexa Careers

Flexa Careers runs a transparent platform for flexible working policies and job opportunities.

View all 8 companies

Team

Marla Shapiro

Marla Shapiro

Managing Partner

Marla serves as managing partner at HERmesa. Her background includes commercial leadership roles at Jamatto and Voddler, alongside business development experience at PRS for Music.

LinkedIn
WS

Wibke Stoffers

Partner

Wibke brings investor and marketing experience from roles at HERmesa, LYS Technologies, and Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. She also advises start-ups, funds, and corporates in consumer, health, and wellness markets.

LinkedIn

Recent investments

Pre-Seed
£1.2M

HERmesa led the pre-seed round, which includes backing from multiple institutional investors and Innovate UK grants.

"When only a small minority can deliver best practice, the problem isn’t effort. It’s design. I brought what I was seeing in practice, and I brought the evidence that already existed but simply wasn’t being used consistently. Peripear exists because the standard of care couldn’t possibly be the best we could do,"
— Nina van Schaick, Co-founder
Other
£350K

The funding follows co-development agreements with major food and packaging producers.

"Food safety shouldn’t be a guessing game. We’ve built a sensor that does the sniff test for you — turning an invisible chemical signal into something anyone in the supply chain can read at a glance. When you can read the quality of every pack, you can build intelligence about the whole supply chain that has never existed before. With HERmesa’s backing, we can move faster from co-development to commercial rollout and get our technology into the hands of the manufacturers and retailers who need it most."
— Anna Winter, Co-founder & CEO
£1.1M

The funding round was led by industry figures including Fabienne Viala and will support product development and team expansion.

"The industry thrives on collaboration, yet the way teams communicate is structured for failure. On-site teams have the most amount of knowledge, yet it’s largely untapped. We are solving one of the industry’s biggest productivity problems by making it easy for on-site and office-based teams to communicate and report in real time. This funding allows us to accelerate product development and scale across the sector."
— Sarah Crawley, Co-founder
Seed
£4.5M

The Bristol based biotech startup secured £4.5m from Eos Advisory, Calculus Capital, and HERmesa to expand manufacturing and drive commercial validation.

"The founding team of EnsiliTech is not just a team of collaborators. There is deep respect between all members of the team… created as a result of aligned values, respect for each other’s personalities, diversity of thought and backgrounds…"
— Asya Sartbaeva, CEO