Snoop Dogg’s firm backs UK cannabis clinic with £4.5m

Other private investors in the fundraising led by the rapper’s Casa Verde Capital – which is the largest in the sector in the UK to date – include former Premier League footballers Bobby Zamora and Mark Noble, and the strategic investor and art entrepreneur Jay Rutland.

Medical cannabis became legal in the UK in November 2018 after a campaign to make it available to children with severe epilepsy. The market is approaching a £1bn valuation and is set to support 100,000 patients this year.

Casa Verde’s investment is smaller than the average for the UK venture capital sector, which is seeing increased competition among investors for top deals. Figures compiled for The Observer by Pitchbook show that the top 10 deals this year have made up more than a quarter of total UK VC funding.

In the eight months to the beginning of September, companies raised £8.9bn in VC funding – £2.4bn (26.9%) of which went to the 10 largest deals. That was down slightly from 27.1% in 2024, but up sharply – by 11 percentage points – from 2023.

Four of the top 10 deals involved companies developing AI technology. Those included Synthesia, which raised $180m for its text-to-avatar technology; Quantexa, with $175m raised to fight fraud; and Cera, which raised $150m for its AI-based in-home healthcare app.

The largest round this year went to a company developing new drugs, rather than finding uses for old ones. Isomorphic Labs, a London startup spun out of Google’s Deepmind in 2021, believes AI can cut in half the time taken to develop a drug. In May, it raised $600m (£450m) from investors including GV, the investment arm of Google, and Open AI backer Thrive Capital.

Photograph by Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns