Private Equity
Portfolio

Click on a company name to read more:

Ashford Colour Press

Ashford Colour Press specialises in the quality production of books, manuals, catalogues and brochures in black & white and full colour.

Formed in 1980, Ashford Colour Press rapidly established a reputation for quality and efficiency. Its success is built on understanding customers' needs and delivering each job on time, on budget and to the highest standards. Ashford's customer base represents a broad spectrum of commerce, including advertising agencies, finance houses and publishers from educational, professional and games sectors.

www.ashford-colour-press.co.uk link opens in new window

BlisMobile Media Ltd.

BlisMobile Media Ltd. is a leading media and technology solutions provider for display advertising. Founded in 2004, the company delivers targeted audiences to advertising agencies, brand advertisers and publishers. Blis Media's leading industry expertise and geo targeting capabilities provides a strategic advantage to its clients by leveraging insights to reach audiences. Its flagship solution Infinity+ allows brands to reach a targeted premium audience in an efficient RTB environment. The company is headquartered in London with an office in Sydney and is backed by Beringea, Meridian Growth Capital and BallPark Ventures.

www.blismedia.com

Campden Media

Campden Media is a London-based publisher providing essential information in two core markets - financial and healthcare, via the combined media of print, electronic publications, conferences and exhibitions.

They provide relevant, timely and expert information of practical business use to target audiences. To this end, the company works closely with business leaders, policy makers, professional associations and technical specialists.

http://www.campden.com link opens in new window

Celebrus Technologies

Celebrus Technologies' tag-free digital big data software feeds individual-level data from websites, mobile apps and social media into a wide variety of big data technologies in real-time.  Celebrus' global blue chip clients use this highly granular data to power advanced customer analytics and real-time personalisation and to drive actions that maximise revenue, marketing effectiveness and brand loyalty.  Celebrus partners with world-leading technology companies, including SAS, Teradata and Microstrategy, to provide integrated solutions that meet critical business goals.  Celebrus also has global reach with their fast and flexible digital data and real-time personalisation platforms available from resellers across the world, as well as direct clients including AXA, Hiscox, Belron (Autoglass), ghd, P&O Ferries and directgov.

www.celebrus.com

Centurion Electronics is one of the UK's fastest growing technology companies. Established in 1993, Centurion originally supplied products to the automotive market, concentrating on vehicle security systems.

In1999, through research and relationship development with manufacturers across the globe, the company launched a new range of products - in-car entertainments products. Specializing in TFT LCD screen technology andmobile multi-media products, the new products were introduced to the market under the brands Centurion Professional, Plug & Play andnecvox. These products were aimed at motor manufacturers, motordealers, mainstream retailers and specialist independent retailers throughout the UK.

Proven and ProVen Growth & Income VCT exited their investment in Centurion in April 2004.

Chorion

Chorion is an intellectual property owning brand creation and management business. The company’s strategy is to acquire classic  literary estates and then to re-invigorate them through a brand creation process in order to build their value in publishing and in other avenues of exploitation such as television, audio and licensing.

Its principal properties and brands are the literary works and character brands of Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple), Enid Blyton (Noddy, Famous Five) and Georges Simenon (Inspector Maigret). Chorionalso recently acquired all rights to Mr. Men and Little Miss, created by Roger Hargreaves.

Global Rights Fund II exited its investment in Chorion in May 2006.

www.chorion.co.uk link opens in new window

CInergy

CInergy International was set up in the UK in 2003 to deliver customer acquisition and retention solutions to providers of mobile and fixed telecom, broadband and digital television services. 

 

CInergy has provided a marketing intelligence and customer retention service to UK mobile network operators for many years and has active relationships with Vodafone and Orange.  

 

Mobilife is the first mobile phone comparison service offering tailored deals to UK customers. It recommends the best deal for an individual phone user in a single online session based on analysis of their actual phone usage, gleaned directly from their phone bill. Search results and recommendations are sourced from all deals currently available from the major UK networks to help anyone who has a contract mobile phone – or who is thinking of getting one – to make the most of their mobiles and save money in the process. The service began beta trials in autumn 2010 and already has a growing base of active users.

 

www.mobilife.com


 

Coolabi

Coolabi specializes in the ownership, production and creative management of high quality children's and family intellectual property assets. It also controls global exploitation of these assets through licensing, merchandising and distribution.

The group owns or controls the intellectual property rights to international brands including King Arthur's Disasters, as well as selected rights to properties such as the Hammer House of Horror. Assets are managed through one or both of Coolabi's two principal divisions, Coolabi Productions Limited and Coolabi Licensing Limited.

www.coolabi.com link opens in new window

Dianomi

Dianomi is a digital marketing services company delivering advertising solutions to over 120 companies across a distribution network of over 50 online publishers.

Dianomi was founded in 2003 and promotes advertisers’ brands and products via a specialized pay-per-lead service. The company boasts publishing partners such as The Times, The FT, The Telegraph, The Guardian, MSN ,AOL, Tiscali, the London Stock Exchange and the Investors Chronicle.

www.dianomi.com link opens in new window

Eagle Rock Entertainment

Eagle Rock is a producer, publisher and worldwide distributor of music programming and documentaries for TV and DVD. Key properties include live concert performances from artists including The Bee Gees, Janet Jackson, The Who and Eric Clapton. Eagle Rock's catalog also contains the 'Classic Album' series, including releases from Pink Floyd, Nirvana and Queen.

Eagle Rock operates from its corporate headquarters in London and at other sites in Aldershot, Hamburg, Paris, and New York.

www.eaglerockent.com link opens in new window

Eagle-i Music

Eagle-i Music is a leading independent music publishing company who cares about artists, writers and their music. The company has a global centralized database hub, which allows international royalties to be processed more quickly, more often and more accurately. The Eagle-i Music team takes pride to ensure efficiency is of top priority and the company's experience from working with and at collection societies ensures it does just that.

Clients have full online access to Eagle-i Music's database, providing a comprehensive and transparent bird’s eye view of work registrations and accountings. Pipeline advances on forthcoming royalties can also be requested.

Eagle-i Music's creative and synchronization specialists devote their time to careful exploitation of a client's repertoire, setting trends within the industry and being fully commercially aware of all relevant and emerging markets.

www.eagle-imusic.com

Echo360

Echo360 provides students the opportunity to be freed from traditional barriers to learning with an on-demand education experience. Full-time, part-time, distance, continuing, and online all describe today's student living in a 24/7 world.

By convergingon-demand media and education, Echo360 helps colleges and universities engage students on the students' terms with full and unbounded access to classroom-based content via multi platform replay.

Developed in partnership with the University of Western Australia, Echo360 offers scalable and affordable lecture capture solutions that can provide institutions of all sizes with universal availability of lecture content.

www.echo360.com link opens in new window

Espotting Media (renamed MIVA) was Europe’s leading performance-based advertising medium. In 2004, Espotting Media was acquired by the FindWhat.com Group in a merger and acquisition strategy that brought together numerous companies from around the globe. The new entity was renamed MIVA (NASDAQ: MIVA) and currently serves more than 100,000 companies across three continents grow their businesses through performance marketing services.

www.miva.com link opens in new window

Espresso Group

Established in 1997, Espresso Group is the UK market leader in the provision of broadband, video and multi-media educational resources. These resources are delivered via platform independent distribution systems tailored to customers' needs. The Company's services are imaginative, fully indexed and searchable resources featuring videoclips, newspaper reports and specially filmed video produced by Espresso. The Espresso for Primary Schools and Secondary Service are all linked and cross referenced to National Curriculum attainment targets.

The service has been designed to meet two objectives. First to stimulate children and teach them skills relevant to their Key Stage and second to provide a rich resource that makes planning and researching lessons enjoyable and stress-free for teachers. Pupils also benefit from access to Espresso's use of contemporary TV programmes and news footage, are re-dubbed for greater relevance to the National Curriculum and which bring current affairs from around the world into the classroom.

www.espresso.co.uk link opens in new window

Fjord

Fjord is a leading digital design innovation consultancy in the mobile convergence space, with offices in London, Helsinki, Berlin and New York. The Fjord mission is to help customers innovate better. Fjord creates transforming services and interfaces that create greater profit through elegant simplicity, and has been doing so for seven years.

Fjordis the only service design company set up specifically to offer exper tunderstanding of the business and design issues involved in delivering fluently across multiple channels. Fjord was recently instrumental in helping the BBC devise and create the award winning BBC iPlayer for mobile. Key clients include: BBC, Nokia, Orange, Swisscom and Yahoo!

www.fjordnet.com link opens in new window

Grab Networks

Formed by the merger of Anystream and Voxant, Grab Networks™Grab Networks is the Web’s premiere hyper distribution network, offering content providers a comprehensive solution to host, distribute and monetize streaming media.  As an ad-supported, video-only global syndication network with a monthly unique audience of more than 15 million viewers, Grab Networks sources short-form video content from leading media companies and distributes programming to exploit untapped revenue streams.

www.grabnetworks.com link opens in new window

GyroGroup PLC is the UK's leading integrated, B2B brand communications agency. The company provides an integrated suite of marketing services including brand strategy, direct marketing, on and off-line advertising, media planning, web marketing and event management.

Gyro's single focus is the technology and financial services sectors and it is known for providing innovative solutions for clients, who benefit from high returns on investment. Gyro's clients include Adobe Systems, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Iomega, MCI, Deutsche Bank, American Express, Orange and, most recently, they have won Symantec's business in EMEA.

Gyrowas founded in 1991 and has established offices in London, Geneva, Stockholm, Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco and Dublin.

Beringea exited its investment in Gyro Group in February 2008.

www.gyrogroup.com link opens in new window

i-level (renamed iLG Digital) launched in April 1999 and grew to become Europe's largest independent online media buyer. It is a digital marketing company, specializing in media planning and buying on the internet, email and mobile devices. Beringea exited its investment in iLG in April 2008.

www.i-level.com link opens in new window

Bold indicates a current portfolio company

Immedia

Immedia are the world leaders in providing "live" tailored radiostations to retail - specialists in audience engagement for both staffand consumers. The company installs and operates radio stations for nearly 7000 stores in the UK and Ireland, to HSBC, IKEA, LloydsPharmacy, Spar and others.

Each radio station is tailored specifically to the brand owner, featuring key presenters and music to match mood and inspiration. Each station is interactive, using phones or text, web links and podcasts.
Immedia has expanded its services to design stations for corporate workforces and transportation.
 
www.immediaplc.com link opens in new window

InSkin Media

InSkin™ Media is an advertising technology business, with proprietary ad formats for online video advertising and a premium, rich media video advertising network.

InSkin Media's ad formats (InSkinVideo, i-Roll and PageSkin) wrap around the video player or pages on a publisher’s website, and remain visible for the entire video or page duration. The user never leaves his/her trusted publisher site - the advertiser comes to the user. When the user interacts with the InSkin ('wrapper) the unique InSkin Media technology pauses the video and delivers a powerful user experience, through an expanded creative (InSkin Expandable). When the user finishes s/he simply clicks to close, the InSkin Expandable retreats and the video content resumes.

InSkin Media partners with over 100 premium publishers in the UK, delivering an optimum user experience and high yields for publishers. By offering InSkin instead of or in addition to pre-roll advertising, publishers increase their revenues and improve user experience.

InSkin Media works with most of the leading media agencies, and has served effective campaigns for over 150 blue-chip brand clients.

www.inskinmedia.com

Livio Radio

Founded in 2008, Livio Radio aims to make Internet audio streams accessible to more people, in more places. Dedicated to designing products that work fast without complicated menus, the company’s line of specialty radios, including the NPR Radio by Livio and the Livio Radio featuring Pandora, let users enjoy the benefits of online programming – music, sports, news and talk from around the world – anywhere an Internet connection is available. The Livio Car Internet Radio App for iPhone uses a high-speed data connection and a streamlined interface to offer the thousands of free online programming choices, along with traditional AM/FM radio broadcasts, for users on the go.

www.livioradio.com link opens in new window

Magiq

Magiq, the on-demand digital marketing company, is dedicated to helping marketers communicate more efficiently, freely and effectively with their online customers using data captured from each visitor.

Magiq provides marketers with easy-to-use, cloud-based, pay-as-you-go, online services that compile and use customers’ online behavior and history to optimize and personalize digital marketing communications to the individual.

www.magiq.com link opens in new window

MatsSoft

MatsSoft is a true British success story, developing unique web-based, user configurable ‘Software–as-a-Service’ (SaaS) solutions under the brand name MATS®.  MATS® is used in any situation where there is a customer, a supplier and a product or service process with more than one stage, freeing up the time staff previously spent on the ‘phone by keeping customers proactively informed via SMS, email and auto-updated personal web pages. The twin advantages are (survey-proven) improved customer service and reduced cost.  MATS® provides valuable real time management information on workflow and business process management that is used to further refine and improve cost control and service levels. MATS® is currently used by businesses in the financial services, pharmaceutical, public utilities and government sectors. MATS® is also used as a bulk communication medium to customers and third parties, via text messaging and email campaigns.

www.matssoft.co.uk

Mergermarket

Mergermarket, based in London, England, provides a business development tool for advisors and corporate executives active in mergers and acquisitions. The mergermarket service covers a range of intelligence products spanning predictive intelligence, analysis, historical data, shareholder documentation, and streamed video content presentations to analysts, and shareholder documentation. Mergermarket delivers this information directly to subscribers' desktop, PDA, or mobile phone. Since the service was launched in July of 2000, the company has built up a client base of over 130 blue chip advisors in Europe.

Mergermarket was sold in 2006 to Pearson plc, the global media company for approximately £140 million. Global RightsFund II, Proven and ProVen Growth & Income VCTs exited their investment in mergermarket in September 2006.

www.mergermarket.com link opens in new window

Pilat Media

Pilat Media develops, markets and supports operations and business management software for the global multi-channel broadcasting market. The company's key solution is Integrated Broadcast Management System (IBMS), which supports broadcasters and content providers in efficiently managing program content and television channel administration from content acquisition to transmission. The company has approximately 260 staff worldwide. Its target sectors include IPTV, free-to-air or pay television services, broadcasting via terrestrial, cable or satellite, based on digital or analogue technology, offering single, multi-demand or on-demand services.

www.pilatmedia.com link opens in new window

Saffron Digital

Saffron Media Group is the parent company of Film night Digital and Saffron Digital. Saffron Digital has developed a converged content delivery platform that enables content owners, brand owners and mobile operators to deliver a rich experience for their consumers across mobile and web.

The state-of-the art platform includes market-leading video services, such as a video-on-demand solutions, allowing consumers to access video files via mobile and online portals. Current clients include Disney Mobile, IPC media, Zone Media, T-Mobile, O2 and Vodafone.

Filmnight Digital is the leading provider of digital film publishing solutions with a growing client list including Vodafone, T-Mobile, Trinity Mirror and EMAP.

Over the last four years Filmnight Digital has forged commercial relationships with international film studios to provide clients with a ‘one-stop-shop’ for film-related content and services. Film night's various sites attract over 1 million unique visitors per month.

Beringea exited its investment in Saffron Digital in February 2011.

www.saffrondigital.com/

Shout! Factory

Shout! Factory is a broad-based audio and home video entertainment company whose cofounders — Richard Foos, Bob Emmer and Garson Foos —share a passion for pop culture of the 20th century and beyond.  Video and DVD projects include television programming spanning 75 years, live music concerts, animation and sports collections and special interest documentaries. Audio products from Shout! Factory consist of GRAMMY®-nominated box sets, anthologies and “best of” collections, as well as new music, soundtrack releases, deluxe album reissues and quirky compilations. Shout! Factory’s catalog features vintage and legendary performances from some of the greatest — and most eccentric —artists of our time.

www.shoutfactory.com link opens in new window

Skills Matter

Skills Matter is a highly social tech company providing a 35,000 strong community with thousands of opportunities to learn and share skills in advanced, innovative technologies and practices for enterprise software development. Since its founding in 2003, it has been Skills Matter's vision to provide “the go-to space for software professionals in Europe” – driving software innovation by bringing smart and creative people together in an environment that encourages conversation and collaboration, resulting in ideas.The company has run thousands of talks, meetups, conferences and hackathons, create valuable online content – SkillsCast video's, and produce a magazine – the open source journal, which is published quarterly. Skills Matter also offers shared desk and small office facilities to those innovative software start-ups that want to be close to where the action is.

http://skillsmatter.com  link opens in new window

Sport Entertainment and Media Group (renamed Sports Holdings)

Sports Holdings is a UK based sports management business that manages, represents and provides services for over 80 football players in the UK and Europe, as well as for several major football clubs including Arsenal, Leeds and Celtic.

Starbridge Media Group is a Washington, DC-area based TV producer, publisher, rights owner, licensor, and sports marketing consultancy that is focused on the convergence of entertainment and sports-bridging stars and star sports brands with new and traditional forms of media.

Starbridge provides athletes, teams, and rights owners opportunities to drive incremental revenues, extend brand awareness and build fan loyalty via the creation of unique programming platforms and the maximization of core property assets.

www.starbridgemedia.com link opens in new window

Steak Media

Steak Media is one of the UK’s leading digital marketing communication agencies, specializing in search engine marketing (SEM), media planning and buying, creative/design and other integrated online marketing strategies. Launched in February 2005, the company has been publicly recognized for the results it delivers for its clients. It ranked as the 2nd largest independent search agency in the NMA Marketing Services Guide (2007).

Beringea exited its investment in Steak in June 2011.

www.steakmedia.co.uk link opens in new window

TH_NK

TH_NK is an award-winning digital agency that is proud to work with world-leading brands, such as Bupa, bmi, BBC and Lloyds TSB. They are an Investor in People and one of only ten companies in the UK to be members of the W3C - the global organization that ensures the Web is reaching its full potential.

http://www.think.eu/ link opens in new window

TMI (renamed Chiaros)

TMI (renamed Chiaros) offers consulting & learning solutions that transform organizational culture and achieve long-term business success, which have been refined and developed for over 25 years. At the heart of TMI is the desire to excel in helping people acquire new skills, new motivation and new confidence that help to transform and develop an organization.

ProVen and ProVen Growth and Income VCTs exited their investment in Chiaros in December 2005.

www.tmi.co.uk link opens in new window

UBC Media

UBC Media is a leading supplier of content to radio broadcasters and is the UK's largest independent radio producer. UBC Media produces 10 percent of the BBC's total content by volume, as well as supplying programs to several other broadcasters.

UBC produces a rich mix of audio programs across a full range of music, news and speech-based formats and continually strives to extend the range and depth of its programming operations. The majority of the production division's output is for commissioned programs under long-term contracts, and has historically benefited from both forward visibility and a high level of repeat business.

www.ubcmedia.com link opens in new window

Utility Exchange

Utility Exchange is a UK business price comparison and switching service providing customers with impartial, comprehensive and free advice on utilities such as business electricity, gas and telecom – helping customers to switch suppliers, saving them time, money and energy.

The company’s management team has more than 20 years experience delivering business telecom and 10 years experience delivering business electricity and gas to customers of all sizes, from SMEs to large corporations. Utility Exchange’s delivers customers the best advice and service to ensure they always make the right decision when renewing their business utilities. Using the latest technology, the company researches the utility markets every day to make sure customers always get up-to-date advice and the best deals.

http://www.utility-exchange.co.uk