Qureight closes $20M Series B! We first backed Qureight at seed stage, and we are proud to have taken part in this round too. It was led by Molten Ventures, alongside Hargreave Hale AIM VCT, XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, Meltwind Advisory LLP and Playfair. This funding will accelerate the development of Qureight's AI laboratory and 3D chest imaging foundation model, enabling faster biomarker discovery and expanding AI powered imaging across more diseases. Congrats to Muhunthan and team. We know this team is going to continue to do huge things, and we're glad to have backed them from the start. Read more below ⬇️
Ascension
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
London, London 18,517 followers
The UK Seed Fund
About us
Ascension is an early-stage venture capital firm built and managed by exited operators and entrepreneurs to back the next generation of tech and impact founders. Since 2015, Ascension has invested in 150+ start-ups across its (S)EIS & Institutional Funds – our specialist approach and extensive sector reach allow us to identify and scale pioneering tech enterprises. With over £83m under management and twelve exits, Ascension is the most active VC in London over the past decade (Beauhurst) and is UKBAA's Seed VC of the Year in 2022. Ascension is particularly focused on backing impact businesses leveraging the power of technology to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.
- Website
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http://ascension.vc
External link for Ascension
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- London, London
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2015
- Specialties
- Creative Industries, Intellectual Property, Entertainment, Digital Media and Marketing, Technology, E-commerce, Media, Entrepreneurship, Corporate Finance, Enterprise Investment Scheme, Ventures, Entrepreneurship, SEIS, EIS, Online Video, Games, Music, FinTech, Energy, Impact, Sustainability, New Work, Digital Health, Life Sciences, Seed, Seed+, Venture, and Start-Up
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
Tintagel House, 92 Albert Embankment
London, London SE1 7TY, GB
Employees at Ascension
Updates
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Our Summer Newsletter is live ☀️ We have pulled together the biggest highlights from the past few months in one place. Inside: 🟡 More on our wins at the UK Business Angels Association Awards 🟡 A closer look at two recent investments we led: Hosel and Voxmind 🟡 Some exciting portfolio raises, including Bondio's $7.5m round 🟡 Plus, a look at our brand refresh and newly rebuilt website Read the full newsletter here - https://lnkd.in/eEShq3Zx To subscribe to our newsletter, click the link in the comments ⬇️
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This time last week, we celebrated an incredible evening at the UKBAA Awards ✨ Out of 13 awards, we and our portfolio companies were finalists for 7. We are very excited to have won Seed VC of the Year, alongside a brilliant shortlist of finalists - huge congrats to them too 🙌 Emma Blackburn, our Venture Partner, was named Angel Investor of the Year. Monolith, a company Emma introduced us to, was a finalist for Exit of the Year. Fifth Dimension - a company we believed in early, now recognised as Scale up of the Year 📈 A few more highlights from the evening: 🔹 Impact Investment of the Year - for our investment in Sprive 🔹 Women Investing in Women - Iulia Tudor and Ioana M. 🔹 Hardtech Investment of the Year - huge congrats to our porto NunaBio Limited Thank you to the UK Business Angels Association for an amazing evening. 📸 Matt Chung
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Ascension reposted this
What a crazy few weeks it's been, I'd just come back from North America, where I was cheering on my son Luc and team Canada 🍁 through their R16 World Cup run, a very proud moment! Then I headed straight to the UK Business Angels Association Awards, which was a brilliant reminder of the energy driving the UK startup ecosystem right now. I couldn't be prouder to share that Ascension was named Seed VC of the Year. This one belongs to the amazing founders we've backed and to the whole team's hard work. We first won it in 2022 and have been finalists since, so it means a great deal to take it home again. And there was more to celebrate... Emma Blackburn, Ascension Venture Partner, was named Angel Investor of the Year. Emma introduced us to Monolith,(exit to CoreWeave and Dragon 🐲 aka fund returner). Fittingly, Monolith was also a finalist for Exit of the Year, a full-circle moment we were delighted to see recognised. Our portco 5DAI won Scale-up of the Year, and we were also finalists for Impact Investment of the Year for our investment in Sprive, Women Investing in Women for Iulia Tudor, and NunaBio Limited was a finalist for Hardtech Investment of the Year, Chris Wheatcroft Thank you to the UKBAA and to everyone working to build the UK's early-stage ecosystem and, above all, to our founders 🙏 🙏 🙏 and Team 👇 Emma Steele Rakesh Murria Remy Minute Sonia Powar Kip Meek Keir Wright-Whyte Alex Heerema Romha Berhane Toyosi Ogedengbe Ben Fletcher Bill Bousfield Freya Wordsworth
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Ringing the fundraise bell 🛎️ Saltroad.com - Speech & Language Therapy has raised £1.5M, alongside acquiring AI documentation platform Ogma, and Neuronostics has raised £3M to advance its epilepsy biomarker platform. Two very different businesses and we are very proud to be part of both rounds. Saltroad - round led by Techstart Ventures, with participation from us, ScaleX Ventures and angel investors. We've backed Darren Lester and Debi Lester since their pre-seed, and it has been amazing to watch their growth. The Ogma acquisition frees up Saltroad's 1,000+ therapists to spend less time on admin and more time with the children who need them. Neuronostics - co-led by Empirical Ventures with participation from The FSE Group and others, has raised £3M. Neuronostics develops BioEP, a patented digital biomarker platform for epilepsy diagnosis and prognosis. We've backed the team since their pre-seed, and it's been a privilege watching them tackle epilepsy diagnosis, where patients can wait over a year for answers. Congrats to the teams, we're proud to back founders solving problems that matter.
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Alongside our UKBAA finalist announcement, we're delighted to be shortlisted in three categories at the Enterprise Investment Scheme Association (EISA) Awards 2026: ▪️ Best EIS Investment Manager ▪️ Best SEIS Investment Manager ▪️ EISA Impact Investment for our investment in Sprive Tax-efficient schemes like EIS and SEIS play a vital role in the UK's early-stage ecosystem, unlocking the capital that helps founders scale and excel, and we are very proud to be part of it. Congrats to all the other finalists, and thank you to EISA!
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Proud to be a triple finalist at the UKBAA Investment Awards 🎉 We are up for: ▪️Seed VC of the Year ▪️Impact Investment of the Year, for backing Sprive Jinesh Vohra ▪️Women in Innovation Award, recognising our Partner, Iulia Tudor, for backing founder Ioana M. A huge thank you to UKBAA, and congratulations to all the fellow finalists. We're looking forward to celebrating with everyone at the awards ceremony.
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Ascension reposted this
We’ve raised an $11m Series A! And we’ve got a billboard in Times Square to celebrate 🎉 Our round is led by Portage, with participation from F Capital and continued support from Y Combinator, 6 Degrees Capital, Haatch and Ventures Together. When we started Happl in 2022, the belief was simple: benefits should be easy to understand, easy to manage and easy to implement. Four years on, what we've built goes way past that. A global benefits operating system that handles the country-by-country admin for multinational employers, across 160+ countries. But the reason hasn't changed. HR teams get into this job because they care about people, not spreadsheets. We want them back doing the work that matters. That’s why we’ve replaced fragmented processes with a single, AI-powered platform that makes it easier for global teams to offer benefits people need and actually use. And this raise means we can take this even further. More AI that feels natural to use. Self-serve setups, even for complex benefits. Proactive support so you’re always one step ahead. The goal is simple. HR teams get time to look after their people. Those people get personalised benefits that genuinely work for them, wherever they are in the world. We’re so excited to be doing the next chapter with Portage and the incredible Happl team. Let’s get back to work!
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Backing Fifth Dimension at pre-seed was an easy decision, and their $26M Series A led by HV Capital makes that conviction even stronger. Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, and Dr. Kate Jarvis and Johnny Morris understand its complexity deeply. Enter Fifth Dimension, the decision intelligence platform for real assets. It powers investment decisions by unifying fragmented institutional and market data into a single intelligence layer with agentic AI that delivers analysis, surfaces risk and prepares decisions proactively. The team’s ambition, execution, and speed has led to a roster of enterprise customers across three continents, and we’re pretty excited for what’s to come. Big congratulations to everyone involved.
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ManaMind has raised $1.5M to build the autonomous testing layer for gaming. We are excited to have participated in this round led by our friends SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), alongside EWOR, SyndicateRoom, and HEARTFELT_. QA is slow, expensive, and hard to scale. ManaMind fixes that. → AI agents test games 24/7 → Regression cycles drop to 6 hours → 86% of critical bugs caught early This is a faster path to better game launches. Toyosi puts it: "The team understands this problem firsthand because they have lived it. They are approaching it with real energy and urgency, which shows in how quickly they are building. We are very excited to be on this journey with them."
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