Macroeconomic and political headwinds are whipping themselves into a storm: the effects of rising interest rates, bond markets instability and hefty inflation are all making themselves felt in every area of the UK’s economy, meaning there is at the very least a partial recession on the horizon for many businesses.
UK start-ups and scale-ups are not immune. Beauhurst’s data on the number and value of investments going into these companies shows steep falls on both counts as we head towards the end of the year.
In many ways, this is to be expected. COVID-19 accelerated new investment (levered with cheap debt) into consumer-focused, software-enabled growth plays. Recession threatens those companies’ user growth. This is causing some investors to exit the market. Also, rising interest rates threaten the start-ups’ ‘runway’ – the number of months they have before they run out of cash. For sure, some of those companies will have to lay off staff, while some are going to go busy. Some of the investments over the past 24 months have been frothy – it couldn’t last.
Part of the cycle
Early-stage investing is meant to involve heavy investment and, of course, some losses, particularly in the Silicon Valley model. The UK’s failure rate has always been slightly lower, but losses are still an integral part of the game.
But some of this asset class – the more classic kind of venture capital – is meant to be counter-cyclical. Investing in an early-stage, high-risk technology requires a time horizon that can defy macro uncertainties. This is cold comfort for managers with mature portfolios, perhaps formerly relying on a blockbuster IPO in 2023 to return the fund.
Nonetheless, venture investors need to be optimists. The current climate requires an adjustment of investment theses, but not permanent cessation of investment. The success of the innovation economy cannot be measured in pounds invested alone: good ideas should win out. And that still seems to be the case.
Although investment volumes and values have dropped recently, they’ve not fallen to the floor (yet). Just 518 deals were announced by UK companies during Q3 2022 – down 24% from Q2 2022 (686). The amount of equity investment dropped off even more dramatically. Investors deployed £2.76bn in Q3 2022, around half the deal value of Q2 2022 (£5.71bn) and 57% down on Q3 2021 (£6.42bn). That said, it is still higher than all third quarters prior to 2020.
Sector focus
So what’s still attracting funding and what will the stars of 2023 be? We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do have a huge database. And while readers of these pages will know well the perils of extrapolation based on past performance, we can at least identify those sectors that in aggregate are currently garnering outsize interest from the savviest early-stage investors.
When looking at all the deals done in the past five months into new companies getting their first round of external equity funding, the dominant sectors – by quite a significant margin – have been AI, fintech and blockchain. Indeed, AI and fintech have been the most popular sectors for years now. These are followed by eHealth (or digital health), virtual reality and edtech.
But looking at specific companies, we can see the very cutting edge of technology. Advanced Anaerobics, a seed-stage company in the West Midlands developing technology to generate electricity from cow slurry, had its sixth fundraising, bringing the total it has raised to £1.36m. Adamo Foods, a company based in London creating meat substitutes from fungi, raised £328,000 of seed funding. In Wales, Apex Additive Technologies, which uses laser-powder bed fusion to manufacture bespoke parts for a range of technologies, raised £2m of seed money. In the South East, Astron Systems, a seed-stage company creating reusable launch vehicles for microsatellites, raised £120,000.
All these examples are just from those on the list whose name begins with A. There are three points that this pretty random list makes. First, there are a lot of ideas out there still getting funding. Second, they may or may not be great ideas – time will tell. Third, and most importantly, a lot of these companies are also a long way from making any money at all, let alone turning a profit. But that’s always been the point of risk capital investment – the risk.