As announced by Techcrunch UK today, I am pleased to announce today that favorit Ltd has closed a second round of funding that totals nearly £500,000. I won’t go into the details of what the money is for, as you can read our Statement for 2009 which details out our plans, instead I wanted to talk a little about the personal side of the investment.

I started the investment process almost six months ago and in between starting and closing, the UK and the rest of the world have suffered the worst financial crisis since the great depression.

The Good & The Bad

I feel a mixed set of emotions: one of pure elation that in such a downturn that we have managed to raise money (and purely from the UK!). But I also feel for the many other startups that have not secured funding, and or will go under because raising money is now so hard. In the managed offices we are located in, two startups have failed in the last three months when they had not previously had any fail in the previous five years.

I wrote a guest post on Techcrunch UK a few weeks back about UK government funding in which I discussed the recent GOV announcements on funding for SME’s – this was partly related to the fact that £125,000 of the investment has came from Finance South East. Because I had succeeded in doing so, I wanted to share my knowledge of the GOV investment eco-system. I will endeavour over the next few months to write some more detailed, in-depth posts covering the various options available. 

The London Scene

I have been very fortunate in meeting some of the best entrepreneurs in the world while networking my way around London. Each and every one of them has always been 1000% supportive and I feel very lucky to have built such a good set of close friends within the community. I thank everyone who has come to know me over the past year for your time and energies in engaging with what we are trying to achieve.

The Team

The technology we have built with such a small team (we have only been 3 people for most of the last year) is incredible. A massive thank you to all the team for your hard work and efforts so far. 

The Wife

Lastly I also wanted to say a massive thank you to my amazing wife. She has been my rock whenever times have been tough – always having that level head to counter balance my sometimes overly flamboyant ideas. Last January she also gave birth to our daughter Amelia who is a constant entertainment to me and whatever the trials at work she is always smiling when I get home.

If you want to follow our exploits on Twitter you can follow myself (@nickhalstead) or fav.or.it. (@favorit). If you have an interest in Twitter you may also want to take a look at tweetmeme which we re-launched yesterday with a variety of new features.