Technology Startups

The European model of venture capital is broken and startups should look at other sources of funding say two entrepreneurs.

Despite the recent lack of any venture capital investment in chip startups last quarter, two deals this week have boosted the sector.

University of Southampton spin-out Ilika started trading today as a public company on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange. The 'materials discovery' company has a market capitalisation of £18.7m and raised £4.4m from the placing.

The high reliability wireless high definition video technology developed by Bristol startup ProVision Communications is heading onto the shelves of retailers in a few weeks time.

Dutch startup Vector Fabrics has raised E1m to commercialise software for one of the most challenging problems in the industry today - parallelising code to run on multicore processors.

The UK saw a reasonably healthy growth in investment in technology startups last quarter, except for the semiconductor sector.

London-based embedded software house Creativity Software has been backed by investment house MMC Ventures to build worldwide sales of its location based services (LBS) network infrastructure, middleware and end user applications.

Yorkshire startup Akya has launched the second generation of its dynamically reconfigurable logic (DRL) IP. ART2.1 can now run up to twice as fast as its predecessor and will work significantly better with code generated by high-level-language compilers. It also expects to announce its first customer soon.

Bristol startup Xintronix has raised private finance and appointed a new chairman as it ramps up for samples of its high speed transceiver technology later this year.

Business angel Brian Dorricott of Meteorical has put together a list of the seven classic ways for entrepreneurs to lose the support of investors.