It has been a busy first half of the year at Parkwalk. Our proprietary access to deal-flow has enabled us to deploy £46.5m in the last 12 months. Deal-flow has been enhanced by our tie-up with IP Group plc, who recently raised a further £200m to co-invest in the university spin-out sector.
The combined group has net assets of £797m, third-party funds under management of more than £200m and a market capitalisation of c.£1bn.
We continue to see exciting prospective investment opportunities through our maturing portfolio, co-investors and our early-stage funds managed in conjunction with the tech transfer departments at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bristol.
Operations
We have started beta testing a client and adviser portal that will be up and running in early 2018, in time for the new tax year. It will offer valuations and investor documentation.
Meanwhile we continue to enjoy continued support from IP Group across the investment spectrum ranging from deal-flow through due diligence and monitoring and also in the administrative area with additional personnel and systems.
Portfolio News and Performance
The portfolio continues to perform well overall, although the benign economic conditions and continued loose monetary policy continue to support most asset classes, despite Brexit and other global macroeconomic issues.
We closed investments in to a range of companies and sectors, some highlights include:
Congenica: Parkwalk invested in a £10m+ series ‘B’ financing round alongside Amadeus, Cambridge Innovation Capital, BGI Genomics and Healthlink Capital. Congenica has developed software that enables the accurate, rapid and scalable clinical interpretation of genetic and clinical data, as highlighted in the recent ‘Generation Genome’ government report by Dame Sally Davies.
Fuel 3D: Parkwalk invested in an £8m series ‘C’ financing round. Fuel 3D is a leading 3D capture and imaging business. Its market-leading technology, originally developed at Oxford University, has a broad range of applications across multiple industry sectors to utilise cost-effective, fast and accurate 3D image capture.
Creavo: Parkwalk invested in a £13.4m series ‘B’ financing round alongside IP Group and other private and institutional investors from Europe, the USA and China. Creavo has developed a uniquely deployable diagnostic technology, using magnetocardiography (MCG) to measure, display and store electromagnetic fluctuations caused by heart activity.
Predictimmune: Parkwalk led a Series ‘A’ financing round into Predictimmune, which is developing prognostic tests for immune-mediated conditions to aid their management and improve patient outcomes. The company is built on years of work by Professor Ken Smith, Head of Medicine at Cambridge and his team. Their first offering, PredictImmune-CD, will be in the field of the inflammatory bowel disease.
We made several smaller investments in somewhat earlier stage companies in various subsectors including geospatial positioning, quantum computing, nano-technologies, semantic machine learning, extreme data-management and hardware and sensors – more detail on these can be seen here.
Portfolio Exits
There have been no portfolio write-offs in the first half, although our AIM-listed Microsaic Systems share price has been under pressure as the company lost a key OEM customer. They are working on new markets and we remain hopeful the share price may recover as and if they make commercial progress.
We had two exits in the first half, selling some of our Xeros Technology Group at c.300p per share on investments made in 2010 (at 33p per share), 2013 (at 54p per share) and 2014 (at 123p per share).
We also exited Horizon Discovery plc, generating a 2.36x return (3.37x inclusive of initial tax reliefs) for our investors.
We also distributed an escrow payment from a previous successful exit in the first half of this year.
