Mike Dimelow (pictured), vice-president of strategic business development at Arm, a UK-based chip designer recently acquired by Japan-based internet and phone conglomerate Softbank, has left to co-found a venture capital firm.
As reported by sister paper Global Government Venturing last week, UK state-owned development bank British Business Bank invested in Dimelow’s new firm, Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), which raised £150m ($188m) in initial close. ADV is expected to make a final close at to £250m by June having already had commitments from life assurer Legal & General’s investment group, Legal & General Capital, and investment firm Woodford Investment Management.
Dimelow said: “After committing over 10 years of my life and soul to ARM, its customers and partners, I¹ve decided to co-found and launch a digital technology investment fund focused on UK entrepreneurs….
“We plan to be based locally, and have investment leads in all major technology centres around the UK: Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford, London, etc. We consider a joined-up, UK-wide story concerning scale up to be critical and so Codebase will be an integral part of our scaling toolkit. ADV will be encouraging our investment companies to scale up there.
“The investment team are all former (some say reformed) entrepreneurs and operators, which means we hope to add value beyond the raw cash investment.”
Aside from Dimelow as vice-president (VP) of investment, the team includes: Lee Strafford, CEO of ADV and founder of Plusnet and Dotforge, Keith Teare, chairman of ADV and founder of Easynet, RealNames, Archimedes Labs and cofounder of TechCrunch, David Carr, VP finance and operations at ADV and co-founder of Dotforge and CitiLogik, Frank DiGiammarino, VP of ecosystem development at ADV and formerly director in the world wide public sector team at Amazon Web Services, and investment leads Andy Mulvenna, Jamie Coleman (founder of Codebase) and David Fogel, formerly head of acceleration at Wayra UK.
ADV will invest in the very early-stage through accelerators, incubators and microfunds and the fund will also offer growth and later-stage capital, with a plan to invest about £200m per year.