An energy management and monitoring Edinburgh company has been given a £500,000 term loan by Barclays to boost its research into the smart energy field.
NetThings, backed by Archangels Investors Limited and Scottish Enterprise, is one of the first in the UK to enter Barclays’ InnovFin SME Guarantee loan targeted towards high-growth businesses.
The funding product is part of the bank’s support to UK scale-ups through its ‘Barclays High Growth & Entrepreneurs’ proposition.
Through the funding, NetThings will be able to trial its energy management system, Click, with a major hospitality group which includes national chains of pubs, restaurants, hotels and coffee shops.
The company is also pending a second trial with a national chain of high street betting shops.
Click enables the management of large estates of small commercial outlets where energy consumption is high and has the potential to deliver tangible savings by eliminating waste.
The European Investment Fund (EIF) has signed an agreement with Barclays to finance lending to innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and small mid-caps in the UK.
NetThings transaction comes under the European Fund for Strategic Investments which will be deployed by the European Commission and the EIB Group.
The loans will be backed by a guarantee of the EIF, enabled by the InnovFin initiative with financial backing from the Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.
George McGhee, CEO of NetThings, said: "The local team in Edinburgh demonstrated from the start that they fully understood our market proposition and recognised the potential of the business to achieve rapid growth."
Jamie Grant, Head of Business and Corporate Banking in Scotland at Barclays, said: "We are extending our lending capabilities and credit appetite in the technology sector for ambitious, entrepreneurial businesses like NetThings.
"In addition to our existing venture loan, we have launched Innovation Finance; this enables us to offer greater support to the market by allowing earlier lending to the most promising of high-growth companies and preferential pricing for all qualifying high-growth companies, allowing more funds to be re-invested into the business."
