CNE on Teesside and the Tees Valley

Introduction

A blog post to make you aware of activities Jane Reynolds is undertaking in the southern part of the North East, aka Teesside and the Tees Valley.

Regular events

Look out for Jane and the CONNECT North East banner at events like:

• Quarterly meetings of the Tees Valley Finance Forum – next is 7^th July
• Middlesbrough Business Forum – The Breakfast Exchange: next is 24^th June
• Hartlepool Business Forum – next event is Thursday 1st July 2010: Start Up Road Show

Finance for Business North East

If you haven’t already heard of this, the following hopefully gives you a flavour:

The new £125m Finance for Business North East programme is a groundbreaking suite of investment funds designed to drive future economic growth in North East England.

As the first of its kind in the England, the ‘super-fund’ will blaze a trail over the next five years by providing vital investment to hundreds of fast growing SMEs and increase the momentum of business enterprise and SME development.

The aim is to support 850 businesses across all sectors through loans and equity investments before 2014 from Tyneside to Teesside.

Ambitious companies based here can access finance from six different funds giving genuine choice and opportunity. These six funds are managed by five different fund managers and target funding at companies from different sectors and stages of growth.

Finance for Business has been made possible by a unique collaboration between the European Investment Bank (EIB), European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and regional development agency One North East (ONE). The EIB has provided funding of £62.5m with ERDF and ONE supplying the remaining £62m.

To help aid awareness and engagement in the Tees Valley area, Jane will be involved in the FFBNE roadshow:

Middlesbrough Roadshow – Taking the Finance for Business Programme across the region.

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

Tuesday June 22, 8.30am – 10.30am

Contact Stephen.warren@northeastfinance.org or Tel: +44 (0)191 211 2300

A follow-up event is planned by CNE for late August / early September to help those seeking funding get further information.

Our goal

We aim to help match up early-stage high-growth technology businesses, and those who seek to fund them. Jane is therefore getting out and about as much as possible to bring this mission to a wider audience in the Tees Valley.

Clearly the Finance for Business North East has a key role to play, but we can also connect tech businesses with private finance. Please get in touch if we can help you. 🙂

We hope to see you there, and will hopefully engage with you on Twitter soon! 🙂