£100m investment revealed for latest scaleup funding programme

Research-led VC MMC Ventures has launched a new £100m Scale Up Fund to provide expansion capital to its later-stage portfolio companies.

The Scale Up Fund will provide primary capital to current portfolio companies that have grown beyond the mandate of MMC Ventures’ existing funds.

The Scale Up Fund can also supposedly participate in secondary transactions, offering liquidity to early MMC and third-party investors. In this way, capital can flow back into the early-stage funding ecosystem while MMC takes a longer-term outlook.

The Scale Up Fund was raised from institutional investors with Bluetower Associates acting as an advisor and placement agent to MMC Ventures.

The Scale Up Fund caps a period of rapid growth at MMC as it looks forward to its 20th anniversary come 2020.

The combination of the £52m seed fund MMC announced earlier this year, the Scale Up Fund and MMC’s annual EIS fundraise means the firm has raised £200m in the last year.

In the same period, MMC has invested £100m across the pre-seed, seed, series A and later stages in amounts ranging from £100k to £25m.

Bruce Macfarlane, co-founder and managing partner at MMC Ventures, said: “2019 has been a big year for our firm, and the launch of our new Scale Up Fund represents a scale up moment for MMC as well as a significant innovation in the UK venture market.

“This fund allows us to double down on our most successful businesses while enabling our investors, and others, to take full or partial exits from early investments.

“We will continue to focus on our core specialism as a series A investor, but I am delighted we can support entrepreneurs with funding through their lifecycle, from the very beginning, through growth, then later stage expansion capital.”