Independent proxy adviser Glass Lewis has recommended that shareholders in Nanoco vote in favour of its plan to delist from the London Stock Exchange and return to private ownership.

The Manchester spinout company said recently that it is looking to delist from the LSE’s main market.

Nanoco Group plc, headquartered in Runcorn, develops and manufactures cadmium-free quantum dots and other nanomaterials. These are used in monitors, TVs and infra-red sensors.

In 2024 it began cutting jobs in an attempt to preserve cash as it explored a sale via financial advisor CDX Advisors. However this year it said it had terminated that process and would seek shareholder approval to delist.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Neil Woodford, a former star of the City whose equity fund collapsed in 2019, is being sued by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Woodford is accused of operating without authorisation a year after the regulator said it would ban him from the City and issued a £46 million fine to him and his company. He is contesting that decision.

The Woodford Equity Income fund was once worth more than £10 billion but a string of poor investments – including tech-first estate agent Purplebricks – led to its suspension and eventual collapse. The FCA said it had high exposure to illiquid and unquoted shares.

After Woodford resigned and closed down his company, administrators wound down the fund. Many of its 30,000 investors were left hugely out of pocket.

Now the FCA has started civil proceedings against Woodford and W4.0, a subscription-based platform registered in the United Arab Emirates.

In 2024 Woodford started the W4.0 Podcast on his Woodford Views YouTube channel in which he “shares his perspective on markets, sectors and the forces shaping the investment landscape. Each episode cuts through media noise and headline hysteria to focus on the facts that really matter”.

Each episode of the podcast has several thousand views on YouTube.

W4.0 told BusinessCloud that it was “surprised the FCA chose to announce this publicly before any proceedings have been served on us, and before the dialogue we have been engaged in for the past nine months was concluded”.

It added: “Throughout our dialogue with the FCA, we have worked to understand precisely which features of the service it considers fall within the regulatory perimeter. At each stage, we made changes and adjustments in response to accommodate the FCA. We have continued to engage with it to seek a resolution. We would have continued the dialogue, and it is regrettable that the FCA has chosen to litigate instead.

“We were clear about W4.0’s purpose from the start: to inform and educate subscribers and to provide the research, analysis, and commentary they need to make their own decisions. We deliberately informed readers that we were not regulated and did not provide financial advice. Like other publishers and platforms offering this kind of information, it was built to sit outside the regulatory perimeter, and we remain confident that it does. Consequently, we do not accept the FCA’s characterisation of the service.

“Informed by subscriber feedback, we will continue to build the features, education, information, analysis and insight that W4.0 was created to provide, and we will have more to share with subscribers in due course.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

OpenAI has filed for an $850bn IPO.

The ChatGPT maker – led by Sam Altman – wrote in a blog post that it plans to go public on the US stock market in due course.

It would be one of the largest flotations in history.

“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it,” it said. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. 

“But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”

Rival AI company Anthropic, behind Claude, said last week that it plans to go public.

OpenAI, which stunned the world when it released its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, became a for-profit company after starting life as a non-profit research lab in 2015.

It closed a funding round of $122bn in March which valued the company at around $852bn.

Growth Lending has provided a £10m SME Term Loan facility to support the management-led acquisition of flexible workspace software provider Essensys, helping the former AIM-listed business transition to private ownership.

Backed by former Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy and entrepreneur Bill Currie, the deal marks the latest chapter for the technology company as it embarks on a new phase of development.

Founded in 2006, Essensys provides software and technology solutions that help commercial real estate landlords and flexible workspace operators manage, control and optimise multi-tenant portfolios. The business serves customers across the UK, Europe and North America through its software-focused, asset-light SaaS platform.

Growth Lending’s facility funded the purchase of publicly listed shares and provides ongoing working capital support as the business executes its long-term growth plans.

Having listed on London’s AIM market in 2029, Essensys recently completed a strategic transformation into a pure SaaS business, decommissioning its legacy private network data centres and focusing investment on software innovation. In March 2025, it launched Elumo, a next-generation dynamic booking and access control platform designed for the flexible workspace market.

Back Market, the leading marketplace for professionally refurbished technology, has today announced the appointment of current CFO Clément Petit as CEO, effective 1 September 2026.

The move follows a landmark year for the company, which achieved break-even profitability in 2025 and grew GMV by 32% to $3.5 billion globally. Founder Thibaud Hug de Larauze will remain Executive Chairman, focusing on long-term strategy and accelerating the shift towards refurbished technology.

Clément has been with Back Market since 2020 and has played a key role in scaling the business internationally, making this a significant leadership milestone as the company enters its next phase of growth.

London Tech Week 2026 was officially opened by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer today with back-to-back investment announcements from the UK Government and global technology leaders. 

Starmer announced a new national AI compute strategy that includes an investment of £400 million to purchase specialist AI compute capabilities. 

AMD announced a £2 billion investment in the UK over the next five years. This funding will support high-performance compute infrastructure in partnership with Cambridge University, research and development with Imperial College, and direct investments into UK startups.

Nebius is committing approximately £1.7 billion to build out AI capacity in the UK, with more infrastructure, customers and cloud capabilities for agentic and enterprise AI. This investment funds three new deployments of NVIDIA infrastructure, scaling up to 65 MW of capacity by 2027, and expands the company’s commercial and AI R&D hub in London. 

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, unveiled a £12 million AI support package for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The program, developed by London & Partners,  will invest £4 million annually over three years to help London’s small businesses adopt AI through readiness assessments, expert mentoring, and tailored guidance.

It was also announced that The Prince of Wales will attend the event for the first time to highlight how data and technology can play a critical role in preventing homelessness, as part of the Homewards initiative.

Premium meal prep company FuelHub has reported a record year of growth.

The Warrington-based business achieved £6.5 million turnover for the financial year ending April 2026, which saw it rank 39th in The Sunday Times 100 for this year. 

The business delivered a 98% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past three years, increasing turnover more than eightfold in the same period. 

Multiverse has announced the opening of a new tech hub in Edinburgh following its recent $70m funding round.

Former Amazon leader Colin Mackenzie has been appointed as the company’s first VP AI Engineering to lead it, and will focus on developing agentic products.

The hub marks an expansion of Multiverse’s engineering footprint, placing an additional centre of technical excellence outside of London.

As part of its broader expansion, Multiverse will create 200 jobs in the next year across the new office and its London HQ.

Constant Group has embarked on a major expansion programme, with a significant investment of approximately £3m across new equipment, buildings and infrastructure to support its next phase of growth.

The Oldham-based manufacturing and technology business says it is undertaking the investment to substantially increase production capability, with capacity expected to triple as a result of the programme.

The expansion comes amid a period of strong trading performance, with the business reporting growth of approximately 37% in the first quarter of the year, reflecting increasing demand across telecoms, data centre and critical infrastructure sectors.

The investment includes the purchase and refurbishment of an adjacent unit at Constant Group’s headquarters and two high precision machines. This will enable Constant Group to scale its end-to-end capabilities – from design and prototyping through to manufacture and delivery – supporting more complex, higher-value projects.

Creator Fund, the pre-seed VC that finds and backs Europe’s scientific founders before they have a pitch deck, has closed its first European fund at $56 million. 

The UK-based firm said KfW Capital – a subsidiary of KfW, Germany’s state-owned promotional bank, operating on behalf of the federal government and the states – has joined the final close as the Fund’s biggest investor, as Creator Fund scales its model across Europe.

Creator Fund becomes the largest student fund in the world and the first to scale the student-sourcing model across a continent. 

Since 2019, Creator Fund has backed 62 companies in total. It returned its first fund last year when it sold Loci to Epic Games – a company it backed after a founder’s six-second video caught their attention in a Cambridge University lab. In the past six months, two of Creator Fund’s companies have surpassed $100m in total funding.

BeatpulseLabs, a London-based AI data company, has raised £1.4 million in pre-seed funding led by Araya Ventures and Lighthouse Ventures, with participation from Alumni Ventures and Avalancha Ventures.

The firm has witnessed 10x revenue growth over the first half of 2026.

The emergence of multimodal AI systems used in the enterprise has created growing demand for data that reflects the complexity of the real world. As companies build increasingly sophisticated models, the limitation is no longer access to raw training data, but the ability to encode human judgement in the context of the specific use case. Beatpulse is positioned to become the foundation data infrastructure layer targeting this gap.

Founded by South African Jason Rieff and Bulgarian Nikolay Vitanov, the company is addressing a growing challenge in artificial intelligence: that most multimodal models are trained on poor training data, limiting their ability to perform reliably in real-world environments.

BeatpulseLabs combines two tightly integrated core offerings: dataset preparation and dataset provision. The company transforms existing multimedia content libraries into enterprise-grade training datasets by cleaning, structuring, labelling, validating, enriching, and formatting raw speech, music and video assets. It also provides ready-made and custom, rights-cleared datasets for companies that need high-quality training data without starting from their own archive.

The result is enterprise-grade, context-rich data built for model training, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. This shortens training time, helps improve model accuracy and reduces hallucinations.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Audioboom says it has rejected three offers for the company from separate parties and terminated all takeover talks.

The global podcast company also said this morning that it expects to report record half-year results.

It said three parties who had been conducting due diligence had submitted non-binding indicative proposals to make a cash offer for the company.

However, after reporting record trading results for the quarter ended 31st March 2026 in April, it said the level of indicative offers received from these parties “undervalue the company and its prospects”.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A UK physics AI company has been valued at a mammoth £1.8 billion by its latest funding round.

PhysicsX 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.

Palatine Growth Credit, the regionally focused lender supporting established high-growth businesses, has passed a £50 million committed limit milestone and is pledging to continue to do more to support thriving tech clusters across the UK.

Nearly two years after the first deal from the pioneering £81 million Growth Credit Fund, the team led by experienced tech fund manager William Chappel has grown to six people and completed 13 deals, with many more in the pipeline, it says.

Maison Sport Group, which operates Europe’s largest ski instructor marketplace and Supreme Ski School, has reported a 34% year-on-year increase in booking revenue across the 2025/26 season and is on track to achieve full-year profitability.

The company facilitated more than 18,000 lesson experiences this winter, helping approximately 50,000 skiers and snowboarders get onto the slopes across Europe’s leading resorts.

The milestone comes amid a wider resurgence in winter sports participation, driven by growing interest ahead of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, alongside a surge in first-time skiers and snowboarders.

Manchester entrepreneur Dez Derry is launching a new venture in the live events market that is rooted in his own experience of trauma and the relentless pace of business life. 

Derry, who founded and sold tech business Blume to Sun Capital and helped take law firm Fletchers Group past £100m turnover, says Escapism is a new premium events brand bringing world-class electronic music, high-profile DJs and gourmet food to iconic venues.

There are two important rules: no phones on the dance floor, and everyone home by midnight.

The brand launches at Victoria Baths (pictured below) in Manchester on 10th October 2026, with events planned for London, Leeds and Bristol to follow. 

Derry, who became an Ambassador for Adoption Matters after speaking publicly about his own experience of being adopted, says the venture is driven by equal parts personal passion and commercial instinct. He knows from both his upbringing and years in high-pressure business that people carry more than they let on.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Revolution Beauty Group plc climbed 28% today on the news that The Financial Conduct Authority had ended its three-year investigation into the firm.

The regulator said it would take no action against the AIM-listed beauty brand, which it was probing over potential market abuse – examining events and accounting issues that took place between July 2021 and September 2022.

It previously discontinued a probe into co-founders Adam Minto and Tom Allsworth, who recently returned to the business.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Raspberry Pi have rocketed 26% today after it reported strong trading in the first half of the year.

Units for the first half are expected to be over four million and adjusted EBITDA at least $38 million.

The strong profitability delivered in the first half is expected to result in FY 2026 EBITDA being significantly ahead of current market expectations.

 

A new Cambridge Enterprise initiative called Leaps is launching to embed Cambridge-based companies in leading ecosystems, giving selected founders access to new markets, talent and investment in key geographical hotspots to enable their success.

London is the first landing spot chosen by Cambridge Enterprise, having been recognised in Dealroom’s annual Global Tech Ecosystem report as Europe’s top-performing city in AI, FinTech and life sciences, and fourth globally.

The initiative has been launched in collaboration with global partners Phoenix Court, Balderton Capital and the BioInnovation Institute Foundation (BII). With space for three companies, the London Leap will allow Cambridge startups to be embedded within the dynamic London ecosystem, which attracts not only international capital, but has a reputation for continued unicorn creation.

With Cambridge being ranked as one of the world’s top cities for innovation output per capita in Dealroom’s latest Ecosystem Index, behind only the Bay Area and Boston, the initiative will tangibly connect two powerful and complementary ecosystems. The aim is to help Cambridge-born companies turn world-renowned research from the University of Cambridge into globally significant businesses, addressing challenges ranging from climate and healthcare to quantum computing.

Companies will be invited to apply and chosen on a competitive basis by the Leap partners and an advisory board formed by investors and serial entrepreneurs with a global presence. Among them are Susan Hill, CEO of Mestag Therapeutics, Daniel Mahony, Senior Partner at Novo Holdings UK, Lord David Prior, Deputy Chairman UK and Global Senior Advisor at Lazard, Dr Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft and Dr Kaja Wasik, CEO of Echo Labs.

FinTech Aveni has raised a £12 million funding round led by PXN Ventures.

Aveni is the established market leader in AI adoption across UK wealth and banking, with over seven years of live deployments and product development.

Its products Aveni Assist, an AI productivity solution for advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, its AI compliance monitoring tool, are deployed across the UK’s leading banks, wealth managers and financial advisers.

Underpinning both is FinLLM, Aveni’s proprietary suite of specialist small language models built for and utilising UK financial services data.

The round was supported by existing investors Puma Growth Partners, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Scottish Enterprise.