Reading, Chester and London are doing well with Oxford Quantum Circuits, Oxbury Bank and WiseWorks scooping up tech funding.
Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC), a quantum computing company, has raised £38 million in the first close of an ongoing Series A.
Agritech-focused Oxbury Bank has raised a further £20 million in equity from new and existing investors, bringing total capital raised to £68 million.
WiseWorks, a communications intelligence platform, has secured a $1.2 million (£1 million) investment to build a solution for financial institutions to analyse virtual communications for compliance and automation.
FYI OQC
Reading-based OQC says the investment is the UK’s largest ever Series A in quantum computing. It will be used for R&D and expansion plans in the Asia-Pacific region. OQC provides a patented 3D architecture, called the Coaxmon.
The round was co-led by Lansdowne Partners, an investment firm, and The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, a Japan-based deeptech VC fund. British Patient Capital and existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises and Oxford Investment Consultants also participated.
This funding follows the February 2022 launch of OQC’s latest system, Lucy, on Amazon Braket – “making it the first European quantum company on AWS”. The company’s technology can be used by businesses in financial services, pharma and logistics.
Quantum computing is often in the news as firms seek to stand out with innovations and push ahead with financial backing. Last month, quantum engineering company Riverlane got £500,000 in initial funding from Innovate UK. Riverlane will work with Rigetti, a California-based hybrid quantum-classical computing firm, as they tackle syndrome extraction on superconducting quantum computers.
Harvest Time at Oxbury
Oxbury Bank is based in Chester and calls itself “Britain’s first and only agtech bank”. It was recently featured in our ‘Tech Companies in Cheshire to Watch’ here.
The bank says it will use the funding to invest in the development of its Oxbury Earth core banking platform, and provide funding to British farmers who are dealing with food security and climate change.
The latest round included founder investors Frontier Agriculture and Hutchinsons Group, as well as existing technology investors Hambro Perks and Grosvenor Food & AgTech.
Oxbury opened its doors to lending in February 2021. In its first 15 months, Oxbury explains it has “already disrupted the incumbent banks and converting the initial £500 million of business will help its customers invest in the future of their farms”.
It seems to be headed for pleasant pastures as Oxbury forecasts it will break even by the end of 2022.
WiseWorks Working Well
WiseWorks’ HQ is in London. According to the fintech startup, the “heavily oversubscribed” round was led by Veridian Ventures, with investment from funds including Silicon Valley-based R42, SyndicateRoom’s Super Angel fund, and Istcapital, joining initial investors Founders Factory.
The funding will be used to expand the team and for product development. WiseWorks has five employees listed on LinkedIn.
The startup is hoping to help regulated firms such as financial institutions, which are required by Financial Conduct Authority regulations to record and keep relevant communications for up to seven years.
With the pandemic giving rise to remote working among staff, WiseWorks reckons institutions will need to deal with virtual communications and get rid of existing manual processes.
In its infinite wisdom, WiseWorks has built a product that captures visual, acoustic and linguistic cues from virtual communications, which enable use cases such as prevention of misleading advice, fact finding for suitability and business development purposes.
WiseWorks adds that it has had trials with individual users at Tier 1 institutions. Testimonials on its website include Societe Generale, Morgan Stanley and UBS.
The startup was founded by Teoman Gonenc and Dwane van der Sluis, who worked at investment banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as natural language processing firms like Signal AI.
