PXN Ventures and the British Business Bank have extended NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance by £80m, lifting the North West equity fund from £100m to £180m and running its investment period through to 2030. The vehicle has already deployed more than £45m into 50 companies and pulled in over £50m of co-investment.
PXN Ventures runs the North West equity strand of the British Business Bank's second Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, writing cheques of up to £5m into companies across Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria.
The fund launched in 2024 with £100m of British Business Bank capital. Two years in, PXN says it has fielded more than 3,000 applications and backed 50 businesses across software, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, fintech and climate technology.
The £80m extension announced on 8 September nearly doubles the mandate. Crucially for founders, it also stretches the deployment window to 2030, giving the fund the reserves to follow its money rather than watch stakes dilute in later rounds.
The top-up follows an unusually strong run of exits for a regional fund. PXN has banked six in the past twelve months, from businesses collectively valued at more than £400m.
The most recent was Manchester property software company Street Group, which took strategic investment from Hg in a transaction valuing it at over £200m. PXN says the deal returned 4.4x across its participating funds, less than two years after what was then its largest initial cheque into a single business.
That kind of realised multiple matters for the argument PXN is making. Regional funds have long been criticised as patient capital with modest returns; a 4.4x in under two years from a Manchester software company is the counter-example the North West ecosystem has been short of.
Louise Chapman, NPIF II fund principal at PXN Ventures, said demand had been "phenomenal" and pointed to founder diversity in the portfolio: more than one in three of the businesses backed through the fund have a female founder.
The fund has also used NPIF II capital to launch PraeSeed, a six-week investor-readiness programme that ends with the chance to secure £200,000 of equity investment and pitch to PXN's co-investor network. It is aimed at the first-cheque gap that leaves pre-seed founders outside London short of institutional capital.
Sue Barnard, senior investment manager at the British Business Bank, said the strength of demand in the fund's first two years reflected the depth of ambition across the North West and that the fund was already galvanising private capital into the region.
The extension lands the same week the government confirmed a separate £150m scale-up fund for the North of England, adding to a build-up of state-backed equity aimed at the region.
Original source: BusinessCloud — https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/pxns-npif-ii-fund-extended-to-180m/
