New ?20m Venture Fund for Scotland

News reaches WIREDVC HQ from snow-bound Scotland, that a new ?20m ($31m) venture capital fund is to be launched by Steve Leach, the founder of digital advertising agency bigmouthmedia. To be named (unsurprisingly) The Steve Leach Partnership, the new firm is going to target Internet based businesses, but is understood to also have its eyes on at at least one Scottish renewable energy concern, starting next year.

Mr Leach is raising the money for his new firm by selling eighty percent of his holding in LBI, a Dutch agency that acquired bigmouthmedia earlier this year. He quit his executive duties at the agency last summer, following the takeover.

“I’ve already got an investment portfolio that includes companies and property, but now I am going to take a proportion of my wealth and plow it into businesses myself” said Mr Leach.

“We will be announcing an investment in a digital business early next year, a mid-sized business with a turnover of around ?7m ($10.9m). But I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as being just digital. Renewables is an area I would like to look at along, with any other interesting investments. If we can crack renewables, that’s a good thing. I am looking at a couple of possible investments in that space. One is a fascinating new Scottish business. Its proposition is something quite unique.”

Mr Leach has a strong relationship with Scottish Enterprise, but says he will not be giving Scotland any speical bias in his selection criteria. He plans to invest between ?3m ($4.7m) and ?10m ($15.5m) each year for the next two or three years, with investments starting at ?500k ($776k).

Mr Leach set up the bigmouthmedia with his wife in 1996, focusing on web services and design. After 2000, the priority switched to advertising and the company also grew to become one of the UK’s leaders in SEO.

It has had the support of US private equity investors Carlyle Group, who earlier this year sold bigmouthmedia to LBI, now Europe’s largest digital agency with more than 1,800 staff.