Envestors closed £300,000 from its members, which will be used to increase marketing and sales in the UK and to establish a US operation – which is the largest market for its products.Reflective was formed in 1998 to provide services to organisations that needed to performance test newly developed web sites and monitor their sites performance on an ongoing basis. During 2006 these services were ‘productised’ and StressTester™ was launched. Sixteen customers have already been acquired including BMI, Harrods, HMV, Legal and General, JP Morgan, Nissan and Vodafone.There is an established and growing $1 billion market for products in this sector. However these products are expensive, difficult to use and require expensive specialists to operate them. StressTester™’s ease-of-use, price positioning and sales model places it in a position to take a significant share of the market. www.stresstester.net  For further information, please contact Peter Hopkinson at Envestors.

One private individual from the Envestors Private Investor Club has committed £200,000 to Quadriga, the supercar club with an eco flavour, based in Knightsbridge. For an annual membership fee, the club offers to its members access to a select group of supercars e.g. Aston Martin DB9. The supercar club idea is based on three underlying realities (a) In London and other large cities, many people need a car occasionally, not for everyday use, (b) Many high-earners would like to own a supercar and can afford it, but cannot rationalize spending so much money on something that would sit unused most of the time, (c) A car club bridges the gap between owning and renting, by offering on- demand access to multiple supercars, for 20-40% of what it would cost to own one.

For more than two hundred years, the name of Reeds Nautical has been an integral part of the UK\\\\\\\'s nautical heritage, having been published since 1932. Reeds Online Almanac puts the almanac online, to provide a definitive marine information service on a port by port basis throughout the UK and European ports. The Reeds Nautical Online Almanac provides the same level of data currently produced in the hardback version, but has the principal advantage of being continually updatable. The business is a syndicate between A&C Black (part of Bloomsbury) publishers of the hard copy of Reeds Almanac and Square Mile International, who are the leading supplier of WI-FI internet access to 50+ marinas.

The company presented at our event on 14th November 2007 and closed funding of £400,000, including investment from seven of our members.

VoxIQ is an enabling technology that combines speech technology with databases, which may be static (updated on a periodic basis), or dynamic (updated on an ongoing real-time basis), using Knowledge Based System (KBS) techniques. At the present time, no other product exists that merges these two tried and tested technologies. The VoxIQ invention uses the KBS techniques to decide the limited set of keywords that the speech recognition (SR) engine must recognise at any one time.

Jura Watches is an innovative online and traditional retailer of Swiss watches. When they approached us in July 2007, they had little more than a business plan. However, they commence trading in September 2007 having secured a Flagship Mayfair Store (Burlington Gardens W1) which provides a dramatic themed environment. Large plasma screens (103" & 42" plasma) communicate high quality multimedia to enhance the customers\\\\\\\' brand experience from leading brands including Girard Perregaux, Porsche Design, Bremont, Oris and Maurice Lacroix. Nationwide sales are achieved via the Jura Web Portal; a secure ecommerce platform incorporating independent editorial content and comprehensive product information. Uniquely, Jura will also provide its customers with Jura Concierge (as offered by Amex Centurion, Vertu & Coutts Bank).
Jura presented at our event in July 2007 and closed total funding of £175,000, including investment from three of our members.

Slingshot is a vertically integrated film business formed in order to take advantage of new opportunities created by the impact of digital technology on the film industry. The company was founded in 2005 by experienced film executives and entrepreneurs and is backed by two industry specialist venture organisations: Arts Alliance and the Creative Capital Fund. They presented at our event on 28th March 07 and managed to close approximately £650,000, including investment from two of our members, to go into an EIS qualifying vehicle to finance and produce three to five low-budget feature films.

Escapism Media identified an opportunity to provide at-the-table food and drink ordering and entertainment to the retail hospitality sector. The Company has developed a unique, award-winning, wholly owned software platform which, utilising interactive touchscreen technology, provides an attractive, engaging and easy to use at-the-table ordering system (the ”Escape Pod”) for retail hospitality consumers. The Escape Pod provides a wide range of services to the retail hospitality market, which includes amongst others, bars, nightclubs, hotel lounges and family dining restaurants. The services available include a food and drink ordering system, table-to-table messaging and chat, and an interactive advertising and game play facility.  

CInergy International is a business-to-business solutions provider that sells Customer Acquisition and Retention systems.  The Company’s clients are mobile and fixed telecom, broadband and digital television service providers.  Customer turn-over, or “Churn”, is the bane of telecom service providers.  It leads to higher subscriber acquisition costs, aggressive price wars, and the erosion of profitability.  CInergy’s Accelerated Intelligence™ (“CInergy AI™”), provides telecom service providers with a first line of defence against customer churn. In June 2007, CInergy closed a total of £723,000 from The Capital Fund and a number of private investors.  Envestors acted as corporate finance advisors.

Porcellio Ltd offered investors the unique and unusual opportunity to invest in an amphibious leisure based tour operation, utilising fully modernised replicas of the famous WWII DUKW vehicles used in the D-Day landings. Porcellio was established by Howard Slater, the original founder of the successful London Frog Tours (in which he has divested his interest) but which still operates original un-modernised DUKW\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s in Central London and which carried c.37,000 passengers in its first year. Porcellio approached Envestors seeking to raise £300,000 to expand their Plymouth based amphibious tour and to launch new operations in London. Porcellio presented at our "Next Big Thing" investment presentation event on September 6 th 2006, and closed total funding of £300,000 on 1 st November 2006, comprising £150,000 in equity from an Envestors private investor, and £150,000 in debt and asset finance from contacts within our funding network.

“I have been delighted with the way in which Envestors has helped and facilitated this investment. The first exploratory meeting with Envestors was on 28 Jul 06 and the deal completed by our preferred end point of 31 Oct 06. Dealing with a broadly based group with a sizeable membership was definitely a recipe for success”

The founder of Grandstands Worldwide realised that current temporary seating providers, which are based on a scaffolding approach, are labour intensive and time consuming to set up and dismantle. With a shipping background, the founder developed a new solution based on recycling metal shipping containers, of which there are a huge surplus in Europe due to current trade imbalances between Europe and China.This business does what its name implies - provides temporary seating.   Sporting events can spend in excess of £200,000 per annum on temporary seating. The London Olympics will have a requirement for 200,000 temporary seats. Based on a modular design, each unit provides temporary grandstand seating of 150 seats and when clamped together (like Lego) can provide a temporary ‘stadium\' for 30,000 or more.   The key advantage is that each unit can be unloaded from a delivering vehicle within 8 minutes by a single operator or driver and based on modified shipping containers, the units already fit existing sea, rail and road systems and are transportable in multiples of 500 seats per road trailer. Compared to existing structures, which are manually assembled and accident pone, this solution is 10 x faster to assemble, 10 x cheaper in labour terms and 10 x stronger.   Target sectors include football, rugby, motorsport, horse racing, tennis, cycling, baseball, marathons, basketball, cricket, equestrian, triathlons, golf tournaments, military processions, festivals, the Olympics...  

"Envestors quickly grasped the potential, gave valuable guidance towards successfully raising funds, then matched the right investors to our product that ensured closing the deal"