Venturefest 2009
On Monday 29th June, Oxford Capital led an afternoon programme for participants in Venturefest 2009.
Oxford Capital Partners hosted a two hour session focused on growth companies, shining light on creative approaches to fund-raising, strategies for growth and engineering of successful exits. The session was in two parts. The first, ‘Investors Insight’ was a panel discussion during which leading technology investors offered insight for management teams and investors into fundraising in a challenging environment and successful strategies adopted by their portfolio companies.
The second session was a series of presentations from ‘Emerging Leaders’, venture capital-backed companies that are experiencing rapid growth. These presentations offered insight to the challenges and key decisions that management teams have faced in building their businesses.
As one of the UK’s most active investors in science and technology companies, Oxford Capital Partners believe that emerging entrepreneurial teams can benefit from the experiences of others, by emulating proven strategies for crossing the chasms of growth. The Oxford Capital Programme – Accelerating Growth – incorporated expert analysis, showcased emerging business leaders and drew insight from a range of experts on the challenges and opportunities that management teams face in building great technology companies.
Investors Insight Panel: Fund Raising & Strategies for Success
This panel was moderated by: David Mott, Co-founder and Investment Director, Oxford Capital Partners and the panel was comprised of:
- Klass de Boer, Managing Partner of Ent repreneurs Fund
- Jay Patel, Executive Director of Spark Ventures
- Ben Holmes, Partner of Index Ventures
This session gave attendees the opportunity to meet the venture capitalists in an interactive panel discussion. Leading technology venture capitalists discussed their latest investment strategies, supporting portfolio companies in a challenging environment and how companies are positioning themselves for exits. The audience was invited to join the discussion with questions and comments.
Emerging leaders: Presentations from Venture-Backed Businesses
Five venture-backed companies which have raised between £2million and £12 million presented their companies and shared their experience of raising funds and working with professional investors. Each company has already made significant progress in building their teams, positioning their products, refining their technology and developing their plans to exit. This was an opportunity to hear from the UK’s emerging success stories.
Presenters included:
Paul Aitken, CEO of Borro: Borro is Europe’s first online pawnbroker – providing fast and convenient personal loans to consumers that are secured by personal assets. Loans vary from £100 to £100,000 and are typically used to help finance holidays, weddings and school fees. Borro aims to be the cheapest source of short-term finance for consumers.
Sean Sutcliffe, CEO of Green Biologics: Green Biologics is a biotechnology company engaged in the development of fermentation technologies for the conversion of plant crops and biomass into biochemicals. Its primary focus is on the production of butanol both as a feedstock for the chemical industry and as a biofuel.
Patrick Newton, CEO of Helveta: Helveta provides enterprises with software and hardware solutions to monitor and to track physical assets anywhere in the world across extended supply chains. Its primary focus is on sustainable management of timber and food produce using its lead product TracElite.
David Gahan, CEO of Oxsensis: Oxsensis is an industrial technology company pioneering a new breed of optical instrumentation for precision controls in super-harsh environments with a range of “clean-tech” applications.
Paul Davie, COO & Founder of Secerno : Secerno provides the world’s most advanced, comprehensive and intelligent database security solution, Secerno.SQL, which protects data at the highest level.
Uptake was high and all attending reported a successful and informative event.
For more information on Venturefest, click here.
