White Horse Capital announce a successful capital raise with Newsflare (“the Company”), the leading open video platform and fast growing British media technology company in their backing from Edge Investments (‘Edge’), the specialist investment house focused on the creative industries.
Edge will invest £2.4m for a significant minority shareholding and a seat on the board. The Company was identified by Edge CEO David Glick and the deal was led by David Fisher, Investment Director, supported by Jo Smith, Investment Manager. This commitment marks the first investment from the Edge Creative Enterprise Fund, the £40 million fund that was launched in November 2015, with the backing of the British Business Bank, to boost Britain’s creative industries. Today’s announcement also follows the recent news that Edge will commit £10 million of investment to UK television production.
Throughout the investment process Newsflare’s management team were advised by White Horse Capital’s Ian Merricks, Managing Partner and Simon Fox, Investment Director. Ian Merricks said: “Newsflare has an exceptional team, growing traction along with the ambition and ability to become a market-leading business in the distribution of user generated video for commercial use. We are pleased to have engineered and materially helped facilitate the investment by Edge, a leading UK digital media VC, and we are excited at the likely success ahead”
Newsflare is a video marketplace platform for video creators, licensing UGC video to some of the world’s biggest media players. Newsflare matches video content to demand and distributes the content to clients and partners around the world. Newsflare provides video to a wide range of media players, all of whom seek compelling video content to engage their audiences; news websites, television production companies, Facebook and other social media channels, big content networks such as MSN and AOL, as well as distribution networks such as AP (Associated Press).
Jon Cornwell, Co-Founder and CEO of Newsflare added: “Having secured this investment from Edge, we are delighted to be working with one of the most respected names in the creative industries sector. Edge shares our vision for the huge potential of our business model in the burgeoning user-generated video market. This investment will allow us to execute our plans for growth and to achieve our ambition for Newsflare. We selected Edge over other prospective investors due to their track-record of effectively supporting management teams combined with their unrivalled network in the sector.”
Jon added, “Throughout the investment process we were advised by Ian Merricks and Simon Fox of White Horse Capital. Over the course of the fundraising Ian and Simon proved themselves to be both highly professional and experienced advisers. If you are running a business and you need to raise funds, I recommend you give them a call.”
Edge Investment Director David Fisher commented: “This is an exciting moment for both Edge and Newsflare. We believe the Newsflare founders Jon Cornwell and Bevan Thomas, and their dedicated team, have identified one of the key ways in which media consumption and engagement is changing and we are thrilled to back Newsflare at this crucial stage of the Company’s development.