Author: Patrick Killeen

AI hyperscaler Nscale has raised $1.1 billion (£820 million) in Series B financing, marking the largest round of its kind in European history.

The round was led by Aker ASA, with existing backer Sandton Capital joined by Blue Owl Managed Funds, Dell, Fidelity, G Squared, Nokia, NVIDIA, Point72 and T.Capital.

Headquartered in London, the firm operates globally as an AI-native infrastructure platform. 

Its vertically integrated model spans compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services, delivered through a mix of owned and colocated data centres.

The funding will be used to deploy large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe, North America and the Middle East, as well as accelerate the rollout of its ‘AI factory’ data centres in projects such as Stargate UK and Stargate Norway. 

It will also expand its vertically integrated AI cloud platform, grow its engineering and operations teams, and strengthen delivery for enterprise and government customers worldwide.

Growth capital investor BGF has appointed Tracy Bownes as head of value creation.

Bownes joins from private equity firm LDC, where she was a partner, and brings over 25 years’ experience in M&A and commercial leadership, including senior roles at Lumon, Moneycorp and the RBS Special Opportunities Fund.

She will lead the London-based company’s 10-strong value creation team, which supports portfolio companies with tailored growth strategies.

ClearVC has acquired VideoCentric, combining two UK players in audio-visual and unified communications.

ClearVC, based in Manchester, provides video conferencing, workplace technology and AV systems, while Reading-headquartered VideoCentric focuses on AV integration, equipment hire and support.

The deal expands the Manchester-based firm’s footprint in the South of England and adds a new showroom in Edinburgh, which will act as a Scottish base for demonstrations and training.

The ICO has fined two energy firms a total of £550,000 for making millions of unlawful automated marketing calls using ‘avatar’ software that mimicked UK-based agents. 

Home Improvement Marketing, based in Pembrokeshire, was fined £300,000, while Durham-based Green Spark Energy was fined £250,000 for 9.5 million calls, some of which targeted elderly and vulnerable people with misleading health claims. 

The regulator warned that robo call technology is making it harder for the public to spot scams and urged people to report suspicious calls to help enforcement.

Light has raised £22.3 million in Series A funding to scale its AI-native finance platform, which it says can process 280m records in under a second.

The Copenhagen and London-based startup, founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Jonathan Sanders, replaces legacy enterprise resource planning systems with an AI-first system that automates accounting, payments and expense management across jurisdictions.

The round was led by Balderton Capital with Atomico, Cherry, Seedcamp, Entrée and angels including Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charles Songhurst.

The firm has reported 30x growth over the past year, with customers cutting finance operations time by 84%.

Author: Patrick Killeen

The Co-op has reported resilient half-year results despite the impact of a major cyber attack, on the back of making significant leadership changes designed to accelerate growth.

Group revenue for the first half of 2025 was £5.48 billion, compared with £5.6bn a year earlier, a decline of 2.1%.

Excluding the estimated £206 million trading hit from the cyber incident, revenue grew 1.5%.

Food sales fell 1.6% to £3.62bn but were up 2.9% when adjusted for the disruption.

B2B revenues slipped 3.9% to £1.65bn, while life services posted a 2.4% increase to £210m, or 6.5% on an underlying basis.

The cyber attack, described as ‘sophisticated and malicious’, led the Co-op to shut down several systems temporarily, resulting in a total estimated first-half impact of £80m across profit and cashflow, including £20m of direct costs.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

GlobalData plc expects to move to the main market of the London Stock Exchange before the end of the year following the collapse of takeover talks with two private equity firms.

The UK data giant initially announced a plan to move from the junior AIM market in February. However it was individually targeted by PE firms KKR and ICG this summer.

Admission to the LSE main market is expected to occur before the end of this year, it notified the LSE this morning, but not earlier than 28th October 2025.

 

Author: Patrick Killeen

Process intelligence company Mimica has secured £19.5 million in Series B funding to accelerate its mission of bridging the gap between enterprise operations and the deployment of agentic AI.

The round was led by Paladin Capital Group, with continued backing from Khosla Ventures, LGVP and Entrepreneurs First.

The London-based company’s technology addresses the difference between what generative and agentic AI tools promise and the reality of how organisations work.

Oriane has raised £1.1 million to build an AI-powered search engine for the video-first internet.

Founded just this year, the startup is developing multimodal AI that can analyse visuals, audio, speech and trademarks inside videos across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and more.

The round was led by Clint Capital with Hartmann Capital, Secways, Archipelago Next and angels from Google, PayPal, Sony and Jellysmack, alongside backing from NVIDIA and LVMH programmes.

More positive news from another Midlands-based listed transport technology firm comes from Microlise Group plc.

The provider of transport management software to fleet operators saw 12.6% increase in revenure to £44.1m in the six months ended 30th June 2025.

EBITDA climbed 18.8% to £6.2m.

Journeo plc, an information systems and transport technical services group, has reported positive results for the six months ended 30th June 2025.

The Midlands-based group saw adjusted profit before tax of £2.8m – the same as in H1 2024 – while group revenue decreased by 4% to £24.5m.

The H1 2024 period included a major contract with its Infotec division to serve the New York City subway, which has now completed.

Journeo said growth in its Fleet Systems and Passenger Systems divisions – with revenue up by 46% and 17% respectively – effectively replaced this.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Centaur Media Plc has agreed a deal to sell MWCR Limited – the operating company of Marketing Week, Festival of Marketing and Creative Review – to Haymarket Media Group.

The cash deal, for an enterprise value of £3.9 million, follows the sale of MiniMBA to Brave Bison in July and The Lawyer, expected to complete early next month, to Legal Benchmarking.

Last month the leadership team at Oystercatchers, a consultancy and strategic intermediary partner for agencies which Centaur acquired in 2016, completed a management buyout.

 

Redx Pharma CEO Lisa Anson has been appointed as a non-executive director of Porvair plc.

The group of specialist filtration, laboratory and environmental technology businesses said Sally Martin will retire after serving as a NED for nine years.

Sheena Mackay will be appointed senior independent director of the board.

Matthew White, chief commercialisation officer of Frontier IP, is to leave the firm and join a Cambridge-based early-stage medical devices company as CEO.

He is to serve a six-month notice period while Frontier, a specialist in commercialising intellectual property, searches for a successor.

Huddersfield-based advanced manufacturing firm Holdson has raised £1.5 million to scale its patented electroform technology, in a round led by the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II (NPIF II).

Electroform is an electromechanical finishing process that is said to enhance the performance of metal parts – including cast and 3D printed components – by refining their surfaces and removing imperfections.

The funding will enable the business to expand production of its electroform machines, which are gaining traction across aerospace, defence, automotive and nuclear fusion industries.

Founded in 2023 out of a collaboration with Cummins Turbo Technologies, the firm has grown to a team of 18 with customers in the UK, Europe, the US and Asia.

The UK government’s AI-powered fraud prevention tool has stopped criminals stealing a record £480 million from taxpayers in its biggest-ever crackdown.

The system scans new policies for weaknesses before they can be exploited, cutting fraud-detection time by up to 80% and helping protect public funds for schools, hospitals and policing.

The results were announced at the Five Eyes anti-fraud summit in London, where Cabinet Office Minister Josh Simons said the technology will be rolled out across government and licensed internationally.

The UK government has announced a £10 million investment in the domestic semiconductor sector, with up to 40 businesses set to benefit.

Backed by Innovate UK, the fund will accelerate development of next-generation chips that power products from smartphones and cars to medical devices and renewable energy systems.

Companies supported include Paragraf, whose graphene-based devices could extend mobile battery life and cut energy use in transport and defence, and Silicon Microgravity, which is developing satellite-free navigation tools for wearables and robotics.

Tech Minister Kanishka Narayan said the funding would boost national resilience, create high-skilled jobs and cement Britain’s role in a global market worth hundreds of billions.

A man in his forties has been arrested in West Sussex in connection with a cyber attack on Collins Aerospace that has caused days of disruption at major European airports, including Heathrow.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) confirmed the arrest, made under suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences, though the individual has since been released on bail.

The attack, involving ransomware, crippled Collins Aerospace’s baggage and check-in software, forcing airlines to revert to manual processes and leading to hundreds of flight delays and cancellations across airports in London, Berlin, Brussels and Dublin.

Collins Aerospace’s parent company RTX Corporation said it is working to restore systems but warned airlines to prepare for at least another week of disruption.

School of Coding & AI, the UK’s largest educator in AI and coding, has unveiled new £2.5 million facilities at its Birmingham campus to expand accessibility and inclusivity in higher education.

The new space features AI labs, game design facilities, an interactive avatar, podcast rooms and a research centre, transforming the upper floor of the campus into a hub for innovation.

Opened earlier this year in partnership with the University of Wolverhampton, the campus now hosts over 1,300 students supported by 13 specialist lecturers.

The facilities were officially launched by West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker, who highlighted the region’s ambition to lead the UK in AI skills training as part of his Growth Plan.

A London-based developer of agentic AI-native test infrastructure has raised a £14.9 million Series A round led by Redalpine with participation from IQ Capital, Mercia Ventures, UBS and Seedcamp.

The funding for Synthesized will support hiring across North America and Europe in AI R&D, engineering and go-to-market teams.

Founded in 2020 by Nicolai Baldin, the company uses AI to automate the creation of lifelike, regulation-safe test data and environments, helping enterprises accelerate software delivery while staying compliant.

Deutsche Bank, an early customer, has deepened its partnership after seeing test data provisioning times halved.