EdTech provider EdenFiftyOne has announced a strategic partnership and investment from fellow educational technology firm, MathsWatch, following a £250,000 pre-seed equity raise. 

The investment secures a 13% stake for MathsWatch and is designed to dramatically scale EdenFiftyOne’s footprint and accelerate its AI-driven product roadmap, specifically focusing on literacy support across the UK and beyond.

Both companies were founded by former teachers who developed technology to deliver equitable and inclusive access to core skills.

A £187 million AI & cyber plan for the West Midlands has been unveiled at Birmingham Tech Week.

The announcement came as part of the leadership opening event for the seventh annual Birmingham Tech Week, which brings together 8,000 industry experts and regional figureheads over five event-packed days in venues across the city.

Among the most significant announcements were the regional rollout of TechFirst, a £187m programme that will bring AI and digital skills into classrooms, careers, and communities; and the launch of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) AI Missions Document, a ten-year vision to help regional SMEs harness the potential of AI for growth innovation and public service adoption.

Content solutions company RWS has named Michael Wayne as head of media and entertainment.

The Maidenhead company says the appointment underscores its ambition to transform the future of AI-powered media localisation.

Wayne, based in Los Angeles, is a former executive at Papercup, Sony Pictures Entertainment and ABC Television.

Author: Mona Schroedel, specialist data protection lawyer, Freeths

[The AWS incident] is not the first major outage we have experienced in recent memory. Only a little over a year ago a Microsoft outage caused airports and banks to grind to a halt. Modern life especially after the pandemic has become dependent on virtual connectivity and systems. It isn’t that long ago that most people carried cash and would have been perfectly able to bridge a banking issue without complications. However, nowadays cashless payments are the norm and most of us don’t habitually carry cash anymore.

As with the law in this area, the need for practical review and adjustments just cannot keep up with the speed of the advancement. That leaves end users vulnerable to be negatively impacted if the few big providers are targeted or have a technical issue. More ought to be done to ensure that there are (a) backup systems for critical services and (b) that the practical aspects of our modern convenient virtual life are reviewed and regulated.

Innovate UK has launched the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize – a £1 million national competition to accelerate agentic AI development across three critical UK sectors: Advanced Manufacturing, Health and Life Sciences, and Creative Industries.

The competition will focus on developing practical Agentic AI solutions to real challenges defined by sector specialists. These have the potential to accelerate drug development, cut manufacturing costs, and bring new applications of generative design to creative production.

Expressions of interest are open until Wednesday 19th November, and an online briefing event is taking place for potential applicants on Thursday 23rd October. Both can be accessed via the Innovate UK website.

Three UK regions have been given an extra £20m science and tech cash boost.

Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Glasgow City Region have been backed to the tune of £50 million each to support local innovation priorities from life-saving medicines to clean fuels that can cut bills.

The new funding is the latest commitment from the government’s £500m Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF) and builds on the initial £30 million earmarked for each place in June’s Spending Review, along with seven others across the UK, including Cardiff City Region, Belfast-Derry/Londonderry and West Yorkshire.

The Government is also inviting further bids of up to £20m from high potential innovation clusters in all other regions of the UK.

Real estate agency Douglas & Gordon has deployed AI in its operations and will be expanding its development team in 2026.

Since 2021 buyers have been able to submit offers online 24/7, with adoption now at scale. Today, 88% of lettings offers and 50% of sales offers are now made through the website.

At the heart of this innovation is EDGE, D&G’s proprietary technology platform and app. EDGE integrates marketing, operations and clients services into a single, streamlined system, supported by an online documentation library and built-in CRM.

D&G has now gone further, deploying AI to enhance partner prospecting and client engagement at scale. The new capability will enable faster, more targeted communication and unlock new opportunities across the company’s 400,000-strong client base, making interactions with the property market more efficient, responsive and personal.

Author: Dr Aybars Tuncdogan, reader (associate professor) in digital innovation and information security, King's College London

The AWS outage doesn’t appear to be a cyber attack but a glitch – similar to last year’s CrowdStrike outage. The impact is similar and exposes a critical single point of failure. If a comparable vulnerability were deliberately targeted by malicious actors, the damage would be far worse.

The deeper issue is tech monoculture. We are building global infrastructure with very little diversity in platforms or providers. That’s why we are seeing systemic failures. It’s like agricultural monoculture – when everything relies on a single strain, one disease can wipe out entire plantations, because they all have the same genetics.

We need to diversify our technology infrastructure. Customers can design redundancy (i.e., systems that come online when something goes wrong) using on-premise failover or alternative providers. However, this can also be achieved by the providers themselves, such as by developing different competing infrastructures within their ecosystems.

This incident will likely be resolved quickly. However, unless we rethink the architecture (that is, we decentralise and diversify), we should expect more outages of this scale, whether from glitches or targeted attacks.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Hartree Centre has launched a powerful new supercomputer designed to help UK industry accelerate innovation through artificial intelligence and advanced computing.

Located within the STFC’s new £30 million Supercomputing Centre at its Daresbury Laboratory, the system is named in honour of Mary Coombs, the UK’s first female commercial programmer.

From new medicines to climate prediction, it will help UK businesses analyse vast datasets more quickly and turn cutting-edge research into real-world solutions faster, more efficiently and at greater scale, boosting productivity and growth across the UK economy.

Author: Jamil Ahmed, distinguished engineer, Solace

Even as cloud technology evolves, failures within the system will inevitably happen. ‘One-of-a-kind’ extremely rare outages or issues continue to plague every service provider from time to time, which is why the need to store valuable information on multiple provider services, known as an event mesh, have arisen.

From a business perspective, there are no excuses to having a single cloud provider. It’s multi-cloud all the way, treating cloud as commoditised compute, not building apps and services that are tied to knowing what cloud they’re in.

Unfortunately, when businesses first introduced the cloud into their strategy, about 10 years ago, they made multi-provider usage a problem to solve later on. It is now ‘later on,’ and the strategy of using one cloud service is demonstrably dangerous and negligent.

Anyone adopting cloud without thought for multi-cloud on day 1, should opt into an event mesh system or be fearful for that next ‘extremely rare’ event.

Author: Dai Vaughan, CTO, Public Digital

Disruption from large-scale digital outages is no longer a question of if, but when.

Accidental technology failure can pose as big a risk as a cyber-attack. Organisations need to move beyond a defensive mindset focused on prevention, towards an approach that embraces preparedness and resilience as an ongoing commitment.

Having well-rehearsed response plans that align leadership, IT, and operations is key to minimising damage and restoring services swiftly.

Crucially, resilience must be treated as a whole-organisation challenge, not just an IT problem… ultimately, it isn’t about eliminating risk entirely, but about understanding it, planning for it, and cultivating a culture that can absorb shocks and recover quickly.

 

Author: Amandine Le Pape, COO & co-founder of Element

The AWS incident is yet another reminder of the weakness of centralised systems.

When a key component of internet infrastructure depends on a single US cloud provider, a single fault can bring global services to their knees.

Centralised systems may offer convenience and scale, but they also create single points of failure. True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting.

Governments and other organisations must rethink their infrastructure strategies now, or risk being next in line when the cloud goes dark, especially when it comes to their communications.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The worldwide AWS outage highlights the growing dependence on a small number of cloud hyperscaler providers.

That’s the view of Tim Wright, tech partner at Fladgate, following the disruption caused today by an outage at a location of Amazon Web Services on the East Coast of the US.

US-EAST-1, the tech giant’s original and largest location for its web services and data centres, is said to be now coming back online following sporadic service outages for many popular global platforms including social media, banks and HMRC.

AWS suffered from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services following a Domain Name System (DNS) issue at US-EAST-1.

Users of UK banks Lloyds and Halifax were unable to access services, while the UK Government’s HM Revenue and Customs website also went down.

Among the more than 50 platforms affected included Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, Roblox, Fortnite, Signal, Duolingo, Ring doorbells and WhatsApp – as well as BusinessCloud’s own website briefly.

Signum Solutions, a software-based business management solutions specialist, has been sold to Vision33 in a transaction advised on by KBS Corporate.

Founded in 2003 and based in Daresbury, Cheshire, Signum provides digital transformation services to growing companies. Its core offering is SAP Business One, an ERP system which incorporates financial management, sales & CRM, and purchasing among its features.

Vision33 is described as a global ERP solutions leader headquartered in California. The deal will build on its existing UK presence.

Octopus Ventures, part of Octopus Group, has appointed Jamie Kennell as senior partner and head of portfolio strategy.

Kennell joins from Pembroke Investment Managers, which manages the £300m Pembroke Venture Capital Trust (VCT). He initially joined Pembroke as head of investment portfolio, where he developed and oversaw an evolution and transformation of the VCT’s portfolio strategy, reporting and execution, before he was promoted to chief investment officer in May 2023.

He has also held senior roles with NatWest Markets, KPMG and 3i PLC. Latterly, he worked with Corporate Finance International, a global group of middle-market investment banks and corporate finance advisers, and Beringea, the transatlantic venture capital investor.

Telehouse International Corporation of Europe has broken ground on the new Telehouse West Two data centre at its existing London Docklands campus.

Described as the most connected data centre campus in Europe, the £275m investment in the new data centre is set for completion in 2028.

Flynn Management & Contracting Ltd, an international construction and fit-out company, will work with Jones Engineering Group, specialists in mechanical, electrical, and fire protection, to deliver the project.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Investor BGF is exploring an external fundraise for the first time and says it could raise £500 million from institutional investors next year.

The UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor says it is looking at providing new institutional investors with the opportunity to invest in UK growth companies through its regional platform.

BGF’s existing shareholders are Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest. It has delivered a 21.4% internal rate of return since 2016 and aims to invest more than £3 billion over the next five years.

Lazard has been appointed to advise BGF as it explores its options.

Seraphim Space Investment Trust plc, the world’s first listed SpaceTech investment company, has announced its results for the financial year ended 30th June 2025.

The company’s Net Asset Value – the difference between its assets and its liabilities – climbed 23.2% from £228.1m to £281.1m.

Its portfolio valuation was £259.8m, up 28.9% from £201.5m in the prior year.

 

FinTech group Plus500 has reported a drop in quarterly revenue for the three-month period ended 30th September 2025, although EBITDA remained steady compared to the same period in 2024.

It reported sales of $182.7m, down from $187.3m in Q3 2024, while EBITDA was $82.7m (Q3 2024: $82.2m).

 

EDX Medical Group plc has secured funding totalling up to £4 million.

A share placing will raise £2m while a new convertible loan note agreement for up to £2m will be issued to Professor Sir Chris Evans, the company’s founder and chief scientific officer.

EDX Medical develops digital diagnostic products and services supporting personalised treatments for cancer, cardiovascular and infectious diseases.