TaskHer has raised £650,000 in funding to expand its platform connecting homeowners with verified, skilled tradeswomen. 

The round was co-led by Trust for London, Resolution Ventures, Ufi Ventures and Second Century Ventures (as part of the REACH UK programme), alongside participation from angel investors from Daring Capital.

The investment will support the next phase of TaskHer’s growth, including expansion into B2B partnerships with housing associations, women’s refuges and lettings agencies. 

Funding will also support platform development, initiatives designed to bring more women into skilled trades, and the continued growth of its network of verified tradeswomen, helping make home services hiring safer and more transparent.

TaskHer was founded in 2022 by Anna Moynihan and Paul Moynihan after their experience managing a home renovation highlighted the lack of female tradespeople on site, sparking a wider conversation about visibility, access and gender imbalance in the industry.

The British Business Bank contributed £19 million to a £225m Series C round which valued PhysicsX at £1.8 billion.

The UK company is developing and deploying its AI-native engineering platform to accelerate hardware innovation and drive engineering and manufacturing productivity in industrial organisations.

The firm is headquartered in the United Kingdom, with offices in London and New York, and an expanding presence in San Francisco’s Bay Area and Singapore.

The round was led by Temasek, with participation from new investors M&G Investments and Intrepid Growth Partners, alongside existing investors including Applied Materials, Atomico, General Catalyst, July Fund, NGP, NVIDIA, Radius and Siemens. 

It also included the fourth investment made the British Business Bank’s British Growth Partnership Fund I since its £200m first close. 

The BBB said M&G Investments’ contribution demonstrated how the British Growth Partnership’s co-investment model can bring additional pension fund capital into UK venture. Pension funds can increase exposure to fast-growing UK companies while businesses can tap into large pools of domestic institutional capital, it said.

The Competition and Markets Authority has launched an investigation into Microsoft following concerns that customers may not have been given clear information upfront about subscription options when changes were made to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans – including adding new features such as Copilot. 

It said the investigation focuses on changes made to these Microsoft 365 plans, which provide people across the UK with access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Copilot, among other features. These plans can be purchased on a monthly or annual basis. 

From January 2025, Microsoft automatically gave existing customers access to new features, such as Copilot, at no extra cost for the remaining subscription period. The CMA says that when the subscription ended, customers were automatically rolled on to a plan with the additional features at a higher price, unless they took steps to either pick another plan or end their subscription.

Microsoft stopped offering Personal and Family plans to new subscribers without these new features. 

For existing customers on Personal and Family plans, Microsoft introduced a time-limited option to switch to a ‘Classic’ plan. Classic plans offered customers the same features they had access to before the changes, at the same price. For annual Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plan customers, the plan was £25 a year more than the Classic versions of these plans. 

Author: Chris Maguire

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A FinTech company which took investment from Manchester United legend Rio Ferdinand early on has disclosed its financials for the first time.

Sokin, which in January secured a $100 million long-term debt facility from Oxford Finance – having announced a £38m Series B fundraise in December – said it had closed the first half of 2026 at $90m in run-rate net revenue.

Sokin was unveiled as United’s official global business payment solutions partner in August.

Author: Chris Maguire

Rob Waller has joined Happl, an AI-native employee benefits platform for global companies, as its new director of technology.

Happl was founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Towers, who was just 27 when he was awarded an MBE in the King’s New Year Honours List.

The company, which has offices in London and New York, is backed by Y Combinator – the Silicon Valley incubator that helped launch Airbnb and Reddit – as well as notable investors including Tom Blomfield, co-founder of Monzo and GoCardless.

Towers, who has been included in BusinessCloud’s Founder 250, was awarded an MBE for services to the startup business community after founding his first business at the age of 11.

He was identified as ‘one of the UK’s most exciting entrepreneurs’ by Richard Branson while still a teenager.

Waller, who previously worked at TELUS Health, said: “It’s about time I shared that I’ve joined Happl as director of technology. The more I learned about what they’re building, the more I had to be part of it.

“Happl’s using technology and AI to totally change what employee benefits can do for both employees and employers. They’re not bolting AI onto an old system, but rethinking that system entirely.

“I’m grateful to Ben Towers for trusting me with such an important role as we grow Happl into the best benefits platform on the market.”

In May, Happl raised £8.1m in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Portage Ventures.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Brave Bison has submitted a £43.1 million takeover bid for System1 despite opposition from the board of the marketing effectiveness research firm, which is also a publicly listed business.

The cash-and-share offer from Brave Bison values System1 at £43.1m, equivalent to 20x FY26 operating profit and a 65% premium to its share price on 27th February, before Brave Bison announced its initial investment in System1.

Brave Bison said it has consulted shareholders representing approximately 14% of System1’s issued share capital, although it didn’t say whether they had agreed to vote in favour of the bid. Brave Bison is System1’s largest shareholder and currently owns 28%, having made a strategic investment in March which included a share exchange with System1’s founder John Kearon, who now has an 8% shareholding in Brave Bison and is no longer involved with System1.

The offer has a minimum acceptance condition of more than 50% of System1’s voting rights, including Brave Bison’s existing holding.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A shareholder in UK FinTech Fiinu Plc is looking to oust its CEO amid a £16 million legal battle.

Granicus Holdings is owned by Karol Oleksa and Marta Oleksa, former leaders of Everfex, which the London FinTech acquired last year. Fiinu is suing the Oleksas.

Despite Dr Marko Petteri Sjoblom being re-elected at an AGM, Fiinu has now received a requisition notice from Granicus – which represents approximately 10.7% of the company’s issued share capital – seeking a general meeting containing an ordinary resolution to remove Dr Sjoblom as a director, as well as an advisory resolution to express the view that independent directors should review its executive leadership and governance arrangements.

Dr Sjoblom founded Fiinu and is its largest shareholder with a 31.42% holding.

Fiinu confirmed receipt of the correspondence and is currently reviewing its legal validity.

LemonEdge, a modern fund accounting platform built for private markets, has completed a $21 million (£15.75m) Series A investment round to accelerate product development and continued expansion in the US and Europe.

Blackstone Innovations Investments, Blackstone’s early-stage investment arm, led the funding round. They’re joined by New York-listed financial services company BNY, with participation from long-time investor Sidekick Partners – bringing LemonEdge’s total funding raised to date to more than $30m.

LemonEdge has appointed New York-based David T. O’Malley as CEO and board chair. O’Malley brings extensive experience scaling high-growth global software-as-a-service and enterprise FinTech businesses. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

An AI firm focused on defence has been launched from stealth by the founder of a celebrated unicorn and an ex-British Army leader.

Agon, which has bases in London and Berlin, has raised $30 million (£22.5m) seed investment to build Europe’s sovereign defence AI infrastructure – one of largest early stage defence technology investments of 2026.

CEO Tristam Constant founded the startup with Junaid Hussain, founder of defence unicorn Cambridge Aerospace and Google-backed AI and gaming company Iconic. Hussain was previously a partner at Kingsway Capital.

After spending 13 years in leadership positions across the British Army, Constant served as head of European defence at Applied Intuition and was senior director of Europe at Anduril Industries. 

The firm is chaired by David Helgason, the founder and former CEO of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s leading software development technology and game engine companies. He stepped down from his roles at Unity in February this year.

Cumbria-based digital darts business Big Fish Darts has secured funding through the British Business Bank’s Start Up Loans programme, delivered by GC Business Finance, to scale its interactive darts platform to pubs across the UK.

Founded in 2025 by Greg Taylor, Big Fish Darts was developed to help pubs run grassroots darts leagues. Taylor noticed that most existing darts competitions focused on professional players and often charged venues significant fees to participate. He created Big Fish Darts as a more accessible alternative, making it free for pubs to join and charging players a small participation fee.

Since launching in January, over 250 pubs across the UK have signed up to the platform. On average, an eight-week league has generated between £1,000 and £1,800 in additional revenue per participating pub.

The business has also already begun expanding internationally, with its app being used in countries including South Africa, Mexico and Belgium.

Taylor is also looking to develop Big Fish Darts Academy – a bespoke AI system to analyse a player’s throw and match their style to a professional darts player – and Big Fish School of Darts, aimed at schools, which will contain interactive games and hardware.

Cybersecurity specialist Principle Networks has reported another year of strong financial performance, with revenue reaching £8 million in FY25/26 and EBITDA increasing to £1 million, representing 70% year-on-year EBITDA growth.

Over the past three years, the business has achieved average annual revenue growth of 40% and EBITDA growth of 106%, reflecting increasing demand for specialist cybersecurity expertise as organisations modernise their IT environments.

Growth has been entirely organic, underpinned by strong new customer acquisition, customer retention of approximately 98% and high net revenue retention.

Recent client wins include IRIS Software Group, Hill Dickinson, Hargreaves Services Plc, Buzz Bingo and Datum Datacentres.

Kinematic Trees has raised £585,000 in pre-seed funding to enable its nature-inspired, robot-agnostic software to scale, and evolve with the latest advances in robot hardware.

Funds will be used to build Kinematic Trees’ commercial, robotics and software engineering teams across London, Nottinghamshire and Sheffield in the UK, in line with product development, international deployment and major advancements in the robotics industry.

Proceeds come from Haatch across its SEIS Fund, D2N2 Early-Stage Angel Investment Fund, and British Business Bank ‘BBB’ Syndicate Fund.

Kinematic Trees was founded last year by Dr Stuart Wilson, CEO, a Senior Lecturer in Computational Neuroscience at The University of Sheffield, and Daniel Camilleri, Chief Technology Officer, an exited co-founder of Cyberselves Universal, which later became Bettering our Worlds (BOW).

The pair first discussed ideas for a ‘universal robot brain’ while attending Living Machines at Stanford University in 2017 and working on robot control systems based on theories of how animal brains adapt.

Nuggit has launched a £5m Creator Support Fund – a new initiative designed to enable UK-based YouTube creators to unlock growth in their high potential media businesses.

The launch builds on Nuggit’s existing Creator Operating System, which has already helped over 33 high-potential YouTubers. Nuggit creators include Arsenal fan channel AFTV, food travel creator Only Scrans and lifestyle and family creator Anna Saccone.

The platform is also demonstrating strong early results, with median revenue growth of 29% in under one year across its creator base. In addition, with Nuggit’s support, six YouTubers have taken their creator role full-time.

The Creator Growth Fund is targeted at high-potential YouTubers who have reached an inflection point for professionalising their business. While creators often grow their channels on their own, at a certain point many reach a plateau constrained by resources, time and expertise.

Alongside funding, Nuggit provides strategic and operational support designed to help YouTubers professionalise their operations, and become brand ready creators. This includes data led content strategy to grow audiences, help deploying capital, and commercial support to land valuable brand partnerships.

MASAJ, a bodywork brand founded by Scarlet Amies and Alice Vaughan to professionalise massage for guests and therapists alike, has raised £1.5m.

The round was co-led by women-led fund FIGR Ventures and Sorven Capital, with participation from angel investors including Giles Brook. FIGR MD Fiona O’Callaghan has taken a seat on the board.

The funding takes MASAJ’s total raised to £2m and will fund new studio openings across London over the next 12 months.

The business has earned more than 15,000 five-star reviews on Fresha and Google, 40% of customers return monthly, and its revenue grew 43% year-on-year in FY24/25. Since launching on the high street in March 2021, the business has delivered more than 110,000 hours of massage, grown its footprint to three studios – the latest a June opening in Islington – and secured partnerships and collaborations with the likes of Nike, Gymshark and Home House.

CompliMind, a Cambridge-founded compliance intelligence company, has grown from a single NHS pilot to 18 live deployments across healthcare organisations and private healthcare providers in just 18 months.

The growth reflects increasing demand for specialist AI designed for regulated environments, where decisions must be accurate, traceable and supported by evidence.

The company now supports 15 NHS trusts across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, covering more than 10% of the NHS hospital estate. Customers include Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospital Southampton Estates Limited, Cambridge University Hospitals, Liverpool University Hospitals, Swansea Bay University Health Board and Belfast Health and Social Care Trust.

CompliMind builds software for estates teams responsible for keeping safety-critical buildings compliant with regulation. The platform provides a single, live view of compliance evidence, with every answer linked back to its source and supported by an audit trail. It helps professionals find and verify regulatory knowledge faster, while leaving judgement calls and accountability with the people qualified to make them.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Transport technology provider Tracsis has agreed to acquire Mistral Data, a wholly owned subsidiary of FirstGroup plc, for an enterprise value of £48 million.

Mistral Data is a UK rail software provider with a diversified portfolio of business-critical cloud-native software and data solutions that help Train Operating Companies communicate with passengers, manage demand and revenue, run day-to-day operations, monitor rolling stock, and turn operational data into insight.

Headquartered in London, it provides a portfolio of products spanning four areas: customer and revenue solutions; rail operations and staff communications; asset management and data platforms; and business intelligence and cloud security. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Employees of 9fin have cashed in via a secondary share sale, according to its co-founders.

An AI-powered debt market intelligence platform, it recently raised a $170 million Series C at a $1.3 billion (£1bn) valuation – making it the UK’s latest unicorn.

As part of the round, the firm gave ‘9finners’ the opportunity to sell a portion of their vested shares, former J.P. Morgan banker Steven Hunter and Deutsche Bank engineer Hussam EL-Sheikh wrote in a blog post.

“This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time,” they said. “With our latest funding round significantly oversubscribed, we were determined to make it happen.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A £16 million takeover deal has been agreed for a Liverpool firm which creates AI agents for financial advisory firms.

Investment advice company Tavistock Investments Plc is to acquire 87.9% of Plus Group as it seeks to build a technology-enabled financial services group that combines advice, investment management and intelligent automation for retail investors. 

It also kickstarts the group’s rebranding transition into the Vertex Group, following the recent acquisitions of Alpha Beta Partners and Lifetime Financial Management.

The initial consideration for the acquisition is £900,000 payable in cash with a further £3.6m payable in cash over the next eighteen months. Additional deferred consideration of up to £11.5m in cash may become payable over the balance of four years, subject to agreed performance criteria.

 

Saible, a Birmingham-based construction FinTech building software to stop project money from being delayed, withheld or trapped before it reaches suppliers, has raised £2.9m from angel investors.

The funding comprises £2.1m already raised and a further £800,000 angel round, taking Saible’s total funding to £2.9m.

Saible is working with the Environment Agency and BAM Nuttall on public-sector pilots designed to test its payment-control model on live, government-backed construction projects. The first pilot is expected to be a £1.5m–£2m footbridge replacement, due to commence in summer 2026, with a programme duration of 12–16 months.

The pilot followed work by a Cabinet Office-sponsored group examining payment problems in construction and is intended to generate early evidence on payment visibility, supplier payment timing and supply-chain reach that can inform wider public-sector payment reform.

Alongside the angel round, Saible is opening a limited £50,000 Crowdcube-hosted allocation from 15th July to 14th August, intended to allow smaller construction businesses and industry participants to invest alongside Saible’s angel backers.