BGF’s team invests close to £25m into Scotland and Northern Ireland

BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active investor has reported strong deal flow in Scotland and Northern Ireland in the first half of 2022. Close to £25m has been invested into growing businesses, while exit activity has delivered a 3.5x return off four exits.

BGF is a long-term patient investor, making initial investments between £1m to £15m for a minority equity stake. Deals completed to-date in 2022 by BGF’s Scotland and Northern Ireland team come from a range of sectors, including life sciences, technology, manufacturing and healthcare.

Underlining BGF’s mission to inspire a generation of entrepreneurs largely overlooked or insufficiently supported by the investment community, the deals completed have a broad geographical spread across Scotland and two of the three businesses have female founders.

Since the turn of the year, the team has completed a £1.6m investment in Inverness med-tech firm Aiber, while Glasgow-headquartered Scottish Dental Care received a multi-million-pound minority investment to implement its ambitious growth plans.

As BGF’s Scottish portfolio continues to mature, there have been four exits/partial exits in the first half of the year, with a combined enterprise value of over £260m. These exits, which follow hold periods ranging from 18 months to nine years, have returned £63m to BGF, on £18m invested, representing a return on investment of 3.5x.

Patrick Graham, BGF’s head of Scotland and Northern Ireland, said: “After a record 2021, where BGF’s Scotland and Northern Ireland team invested almost £60m, it is particularly pleasing to see this momentum continued through a diverse range of significant deals.

“As businesses adapt to higher inflation and the lingering aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, our ability to deploy capital at scale, and the overall strength of our investment model continues to attract the type of ambitious companies we seek to support.

“As well as new investments, we also recorded four successful Scottish exits, which serve as a reminder of the important journey we go on with our portfolio companies as they scale.”

This news comes on the back of recently published annual results for BGF in the UK and Ireland, which marked a record-breaking year for the business as a whole in 2021. As well as maintaining its position as the most active investor in UK and Irish growth economy companies, BGF backed 67 new companies, investing a total of £600m.

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