The vision is to become the leading online advertising network for participation sports in Europe. Sports advertisers find it increasingly difficult to reach their target audiences through advertising, as they are behind in shifting their print advertising to online. Sportsyndicator has a one-stop-shop for sports online advertising. The company provides a platform to connect sports enthusiasts around the world by aggregating and categorising sports sites with advertisers and online merchants who want to reach them.

“We are delighted to close this funding” says Ransu Salovaara. “Envestors introduced us to an excellent investor who can bring significantly more than just finance”.

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.

Verteka attended one of our investment clinics in April 2008. The company has developed a technique for pre-fabricating key concrete structural elements in new buildings. Typically these include the lift cores, stair cores, shear walls and columns. Fabrication is undertaken off-site in a workshop controlled environment. Compared to traditional on-site shuttering and steel fixing, Verteka\\\\\\\'s technique enables site construction rates up to 5x faster, providing significant cost benefits, as well as de-risking deadline commitments (e.g. Olympics, education facilities etc.) It also addresses the growing issue of increasing cost and decreasing supply of appropriately skilled site labour. The product, called Permanent Structural Formwork (PSF), has been successfully developed and taken to market during 2007 and 2008. The company has a growing sales pipeline, with a number of sites in and around London currently taking their products. The founders developed a similar product for Corus (Bi-Steel) subsequently setting up Verteka to focus on the relatively untapped market of medium-rise (5 to 15 storey) residential buildings. An enhanced product has been designed and will soon be available to service larger building projects as well as commercial structures.    

"Envestors delivered beyond expectations, particularly given our tight timescales and the current challenging market conditions.  We immediately gained a sense of confidence with Envestors and the benefit of their drive and commitment in helping us raise our funds."

With the objective of becoming the UK's leading Fairtrade brand, The Ubuntu Trading Company has successfully launched the first cola that applies 70% p.a. Fairtrade growth to a £1.9 bn UK market. With a great tasting product, the brand is additionally underpinned by a robust Fairtrade proposition, distinctive design and an impressive strategic management team. Envestors successfully assisted the company to raise £500,000 of expansion funding, with part of this finance coming from the Envestors Private Investor Network.

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.

Mobile Diagnostics Ltd has developed a mobile scanning solution to provide affordable high quality MRI scans to the general public. The scanner, which is mounted on a 15 ton truck, is low powered but equipped with superior coils and software, providing accurate and high quality images. The scanner is particularly suited for soft tissue muscular and joint scans, but this represents 40% of the total MRI scanning market. Later in the year, the scanner will be upgraded to handle lumbar (back) scans.Apart from the considerable price advantage (half the price of competitors) the operation stands out in terms of mobility owing to the small footprint of the scanning truck. Low power requirements also means electricity can also be supplied from a standard 13 Amp socket providing a high degree of flexibility in terms of where the truck can operate from. Hospital car parks, gymnasiums, local medical surgeries and supermarket carparks are all places that the scanner can be set up providing quick and easy access for patients requiring a speedy diagnosis.The scanner is also open in design (patients are not required to slide down a narrow cylinder), so making the experience less traumatic especially for those prone to claustrophobia.

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.