Cambridge spinouts Aqdot and Cytora receive investment from UK-based investor Parkwalk and the university.
Parkwalk Advisors, a UK-based investor which manages seed funds for Cambridge and Oxford universities, has announced investments made into two Cambridge spinouts along with support from the university itself.
Risk analytics firm Cytora and chemical encapsulation firm Aqdot both raised rounds, neither of which disclosed the size of the investment.
Aqdot, founded in 2012, raised its investment from Parkwalk’s Opportunities EIS Fund and Cambridge’s technology transfer office (TTO) Cambridge Enterprise’s third Enterprise Fund, which Parkwalk manages. It previously raised $1.5m in 2013 in a round led by Imperial Innovations, the TTO of Imperial College London, which was joined by Cambridge Enterprise, Parkwalk, and Providence Investment Company.
Its chemical encapsulation technology has developed tiny droplets which can carry active materials, such as cleaning enzymes for detergents and agrochemicals for crops. It has developed three products, Aqwash, Aqfrag, and Aqcure, which can be used in cleaning, fragrance, and chemistry fields.
Cytora is also receiving its second investment, after receiving $22,700 from Cambridge Judge Business School’s business accelerator Accelerate Cambridge in 2013. Its latest round was led by Cambridge Enterprise, Parkwalk, and angels. Cytora is the first Cambridge startup to have received funding from both the Judge Business School and Cambridge University.
The company is using big data to evaluate political and geopolitical risk utilising event detection technology deployed around the web to provide real time risk evaluation to global organisations.
Anne Dobree, head of seed fund investment at Cambridge Enterprise said: “With increasingly connected global markets and operations spanning limitless geographic locations, the task of monitoring events and anticipating their direct and indirect impacts is becoming more and more complex. Cytora is in a position to enable clients to observe the world using the web, producing a massive disruptive impact for all sorts of information, analytics and decision support companies.”
