| Investors back LCD specialist with £10.5m |
| Written by Business Weekly | |
| Wednesday, 28 March 2007 | |
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East of England investors, Prelude Ventures, TTP Ventures and Esprit Capital Partners have backed liquid-crystal display (LCD) specialist, ZBD Displays Ltd, in a £10.5 million funding round.
ZBD, one of the first spin-outs to come from the Government’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency – now QinetiQ – will use the financing to roll out its ‘zero-power’ electronic displays to the global retail market. The financing brought in new investors, Esprit Capital Partners and Lansdowne UK Equity Fund, who contributed 50 per cent of the round with the balance coming from existing investors, Prelude, TTP, QinetiQ and Dow Chemical Company. QinetiQ led the round with a £3.5m investment. Prelude’s contribution of £0.5m lifts its stake in ZBD to 22.9 per cent for which it has invested a total of £6.4m. TTP and Dow are thought to have matched this figure with investments of around £500k each. ZBD, which spun out of DERA in 2000, manufactures zero power, bi-stable displays that only require power to update the display content. Its initial target market is retail signage where ZBD offers wireless signage with excellent optical performance, data content and battery lifetime. Early adopters include Tesco and the CO-OP, but with the new money, ZBD will look to expand international operations and bolster manufacturing processes as it pushes to become a major supplier of a new generation of retail signage. Bob Hook, who represents Prelude and Esprit on the ZBD board said: “This is a great result for the ZBD executive team and rewards them for a great deal of hard work over the last two years. This cash should enable them now to begin to build a successful global business and become a strong candidate for IPO in the next two-year time frame.” The ZBD financing was one of two new investment companies backed by Esprit in the week following an investment in software specialist, Tribold as part of a syndicated $15m (£7.6m) Series B funding round. Esprit entered the round with an undisclosed sum with existing investor, Eden Ventures, to enable the international expansion plans for Tribold’s industry leading suite of product management application software for communication service providers – phone companies, satellite companies and internet service providers (ISP). As part of the investment, Esprit partner, Nic Brisbourne, will be joining the Tribold board. Esprit Capital Partners is one of the top-tier technology venture capital firms in Europe and was formed in July 2006 when Cazenove Private Equity merged with Prelude Ventures to establish a new, independent management company to manage its existing funds. The combined team has invested in many of Europe’s most successful venture exits of recent years, including the sales of KVS to Veritas and AlphaMosaic. Esprit has $500m of assets under management including Prelude Trust and the Esprit Capital I fund. |
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