Below are brief descriptions of some our investments. Further details on our investment criteria can be found in the ADL FAQ's section.

LOGISTICS

ByBox

Avonmore invested in Bybox in March 2003 alongside several other private angel investors and has, since then, grown without the need for any further equity financing.

Bybox is now the UK’s market leading supply-chain solution specialist operating with an unrivalled network of more than 18,000 secure drop-boxes at over 1,200 locations across the UK with growing European operations. Utilizing Thinventory™, its end-to-end field service software platform, Bybox manages the entire process from purchase orders to picking, from engineer ordering to delivery, from customer service to billing - thereby minimizing stock holding within the supply chain and maximising productivity of field engineers.

In 2010 it acquired the operations of Newcotech and PPR (tech couriers) and launched a 7-day network (a first in the UK logistics and supply-chain market) as well as extending the reach of ‘mybybox’, its last mile delivery mechanism for consumers.

Bybox is consistently profitable on a significant, and rapidly growing, multi-million pound turnover.

More details can be found at www.bybox.com

IT/SOFTWARE/INTERNET

Commerce Decisions Ltd

Avonmore invested in 2001, as lead investor in its initial seed round. A further investment was made as part of a £1.8M financing round alongside Top Technology Ventures and Herald Ventures in July 2003.

CDL has a software package called AWARD that helps organisations making large procurements manage the bidding process more efficiently. The company grew strongly into a profitable, multi-million pound turnover business and a successful exit was achieved through the sale to Qinetic Group plc in October 2008.

Further details on the company can be found at www.commercedecisions.com

GroupSpaces Ltd

GroupSpaces was founded by at team of Oxford University students and received initial funding from Avonmore Developments in 2008. At the beginning of 2010 Groupspaces successfully raised a further $1.3M from Index Ventures and a top tier of Silicon Valley Angels. Avonmore also participated in the round.

GroupSpaces has an online toolset that enables managers of ‘real-world’ clubs and societies to manage and promote themselves in an increasingly online world, with an integrated toolset that includes a sophisticated membership database, customisable newsletters and a subscription and event payment platform. The product is now the predominant group management product in the UK university market and is also increasingly used by non-student groups, managing well over 1 million group memberships and growing rapidly.

Further details can be found at www.groupspaces.com

Specle Ltd

Avonmore was lead investor on Specle’s seed funding round in April 2009 and has since invested further into the company.

Specle now provides the largest UK database of technical specifications at www.specle.net – that advertising agencies/brands need to use to format their adverts to the differing requirement of both print and online publishers. In an industry first, once an advert is uploaded, Specle can check compliance to these specifications, link an advert to the relevant publisher’s booking reference number, deliver it to the publisher and provide a full audit trail back to the agency/brand. This saves a huge amount of time and resource for both agencies, brands and publishers alike and is being enthusiastically supported by the industry.

Further details can be found at www.specle.net

Tagman Ltd

Avonmore made a significant investment into Tagman as part of an angel round in February 2010. It also invested further in a US$2.3M round in January 2011 that brought on board US VCs Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital.

TagMan is an independent tag management solution that enables agencies and advertisers to manage online marketing tags/pixels and the data they provide much more effectively (Tags/pixels being pieces of code used by the entire digital advertising industry to track the performance of online campaigns). A single TagMan tag is installed on any advertiser’s page that needs tracking and thereafter all other tags/pixels that need to sit on that page are housed and managed through the TagMan tag and browser-based interface.

The system allows tags/pixels to be added, edited or removed direct from a web page in minutes — a process that can ordinarily take months — and enables marketers to track the full customer journey a customer takes to a website. This allows them to plan future activity more effectively and eliminate duplicate commission payments where more than one channel claims the same sale. Since tags/pixels can be easily added and removed, TagMan allows agencies and advertisers to move between tag providers, such as ad servers and affiliate networks, as they see fit.

The company has grown rapidly since investment and its client now include the likes of Easyjet, Subaru, Thomas Cook, Virgin Atlantic, Boden and Asda.

Further details can be found at www.tagman.com

Virtual IT Ltd

Avonmore invested in Virtual IT in 2002/03 and it has grown without the need of any further equity finance since then.

Virtual IT provides  complete IT outsourcing services to the SME market to address the common issues such as wrong level and skill of IT support, slow and unreliable systems, incorrect hardware and software configurations and weaknesses in security and backups at a fixed price per user per month. The customer base includes companies with between 5 and 100 users in a wide range of industries, with a particular focus on service oriented organisations. The company now supports over 3,500 desktops and is consistently profitable on a multi-million pound turnover.

More details can be found at www.virtualit.biz

Omega Logic Ltd

Avonmore made an investment into this Reading-based firm in 2001 that provided pre-pay phone transaction processing services for the major UK mobile telecom operators. Omega Logic's clients included retailers such as Woolworths, Carphone Warehouse, Dixons Store Group and HMV and it grew strong during the time of our investment.

A successful exit was made through its sale to EPOSS Ltd in January 2003 which was subsequently bought by First Data Corporation in the USA. The founders of Omega Logic have subsequently invested alongside Avonmore in several other deals.

ADVANCED ENGINEERING/MATERIALS/BIOTECHNOLOGY

OCRobotics Ltd

Avonmore invested into the seed round this Bristol-based firm in February 2001 and 2003 and it has been self funding since then.

OC Robotics has developed a revolutionary type of robotic arm that they have termed the "snake arm" robot for applications in confined spaces. This long slender robot has the ability to follow a predetermined or real-time complex path around objects, with the "body" of the robot being able to follow the same path as the "head". Snake arm robots can be equipped with a range of tools including cameras, a gripper, or processing tools for a wide variety of tasks.

The company has made good progress and has a strong IP portfolio. Its customers have included the UK MOD, US DOD, Airbus, British Nuclear Group, Areva, British Energy, Rolls-Royce Associates and GE. Following its successful repair of a Ringhals nuclear reactor in Sweden, OCR successfully demonstrated its SAFIRE (Snake Arm Feeder Inspection Robotic Equipment) product during an outage at the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant in 2010. This snake-arm was developed for Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the Canadian state owned nuclear power generation corporation which operates 10 CANDU reactors. In 2009 it won a Queens award for Enterprise and in 2010 won Company of the year at the BEEA (British Engineering Excellence Awards).

More details, including a product catalogue, can be found at www.ocrobotics.com

Bac2 Ltd

Avonmore made a significant investment into this company in 2007 as part of a £2M funding round. It subsequently participated in a further funding round in April 2010.

Bac2's has a unique electrically conductive polymer, ElectroPhen ™ which cures at room temperature and can be economically produced in bulk. It’s ideally suited to production of the bi-polar plates to produce fuel cell stacks (that generate electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce water). The company now has good levels of engagement with fuel cell manufacturers worldwide and has, as a side product of its major research, recently made available commercially its new CSR latent acid catalysts.

Further details can be found at www.bac2.co.uk

Polymertronics Ltd

Avonmore joined a consortium of investors that made a small investment into Polymertronics in December 2008 to investigate light emitting plastics and electronic hardware for wearable photodynamic (PDT) applications. Unfortunately, however, its technology was overtaken by competitors and the company was put into liquidation in 2010.

Cambridge Biostability Ltd

Avonmore invested in Cambridge Biostability Ltd (CBL) in November 2004 alongside a number of other investors.

CBL had developed patented technology that allows the stabilisation of heat sensitive vaccines. This is particularly relevant in developing countries where the destruction of vaccines through a break in the cold chain currently causes 50% of the vaccines administered to be non efficacious. CBL’s technology also allowed multi vaccines to be administered through a slow-release single dose.

Unfortunately, however, CBL suffered significant delays in developing its manufacturing capability. It was unable to find further financing during the credit crunch of 2009 and was closed down the same year.

Pout Ltd

Avonmore first invested in this London based cosmetics company in August 2003. It supported the company through several funding rounds and an Avonmore representative sat on the board as Investor Director.

Pout’s founders had recognized a gap in the cosmetics market for a brand that was sexy, feminine and fun. With product names such as ‘pop my bubble’ and ‘eye want you’ the company developed a cult following and grew their own brand label to over 180 items, including their ‘hero’ product, ‘Pout Plump’.

A profitable exit was made from this investment through the sale of Pout to Catterton Partners a US private equity firm in February 2007.

Inside Out Beauty Ltd

Inside Out Beauty raised funding from Avonmore in October 2007.

The experienced founders had developed “sip”, a pioneering range of natural flavoured waters, to capitalise on the fast-growing flavoured water market and consumers’ increasing interest in drinks that are free from artificial additives.

The company grew strongly post investment and in January 2009 was sold to Peter Jones, of ‘Dragons Den’ fame.