A Swedish company that has built a preventative pet health and insurance ecosystem has announced its UK launch.

Trusted by more than 300,000 pet owners across Europe, Lassie says it is redefining pet insurance by combining AI-powered claims handling, which resolves over 60% of claims in around six minutes, with personalised, life-stage-specific care advice to help prevent illness and injury before they happen.

At its core, Lassie is a pet wellbeing app as much as an insurer, and it’s available to any pet owner to use, whether or not they hold a Lassie insurance policy.

Lassie’s founding in 2020 was inspired by CEO Hedda Båverud Olsson, who grew up watching her veterinary mother grow frustrated at treating pets after preventable conditions had progressed into serious, costly illnesses.

In February Lassie raised $75 million in a Series C funding round led by Balderton Capital, Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Stena Sessan, bringing total funding to $115m.

The company has now launched in the UK, one of Europe’s least-penetrated major pet insurance markets, where more than 20 million dogs and cats in the UK have no insurance at all.

Even among those insured, understanding of cover is poor, with pet insurance having the highest complaint-upheld rate of any general insurance category, Lassie claims.

Leeds-based Vyne, a digital health partner for bladder and bowel care, has appointed industry-renowned urology nurse Sarah Hillery as its chief clinical officer.

Hillery has held previous leadership roles as president of The British Association of Urological Nurses, executive board member for the European Association of Urology Nurses, and over 25 years of urological nursing in the NHS.

She has been appointed to strengthen the urology expertise behind Vyne, an online platform and mobile app designed to empower clinicians and patients to manage bladder and bowel care over time. Through prescribing, dispensing, shopping and support, it reduces admin, creates time savings, provides continuity in care, and facilitates patient self-service.

A new report claims that UK innovation Districts deliver 20x economic return relative to their size.

The report, from UK Innovation Districts Group, found innovation districts are 16% more productive than their city average and deliver 24% higher return on investment than sector-agnostic place development sites.

It said 20.1% of jobs in innovation districts belong to ‘knowledge sectors’, and concentration of these jobs is 28 times higher in innovation districts compared to the average across the UK’s core cities.

Digital wealth management platform Moneybox has successfully completed its £45 million secondary share sale through the London Stock Exchange’s Private Securities Market.

The transaction confirms Moneybox’s valuation at around £800 million, approximately 45% higher than the valuation achieved at the company’s last secondary share sale in 2024.

Apis Global Growth Fund III, for which Apis Partners Group acts as portfolio manager, was the lead investor and accounted for the majority of the transaction, increasing its investment in Moneybox following its initial investment in 2024. 

 

ANNA Money has acquired Business Data Group (BDG) and UK Business Forums (UKBF).

ANNA, described as an ‘AI-powered business account that does your taxes’, said the double swoop marks a major milestone in its ambition to build an AI-powered operating system helping entrepreneurs start, run and grow their business.

The additions widen its reach to entrepreneurs at the moment they decide to start a business. Through BDG’s network of independent formation agents, ANNA will now be able to support many more founders from company formation onwards, creating a seamless journey from incorporation through to the day-to-day administration of running a business.

ANNA has also acquired UK Business Forums, the long-established community platform supporting over 160,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs across the UK. ANNA will continue to invest directly in the UKBF community, bringing its business support tools to members to help small business owners spend less time on admin and more time running their businesses.

Investment manager M&G plc has appointed Matt Mansour as chief technology and AI officer.

Mansour will join on Wednesday 16th September and report to group CEO Andrea Rossi. He replaces Chris Cochrane, who is stepping down from his role at the end of July after eight years with the firm.

Mansour brings more than 30 years of international experience leading large-scale technology, digital, operations and business transformation programmes across the financial services sector. Most recently, he’s been consulting at SMBC Group as COO for AI enablement and next gen technology. Mansour was also part of the founding executive team for AI startup kAIgentic, where he is now a strategic adviser.

Prior to this, he spent seven years at QBE Insurance following a number of senior leadership roles at Barclays and more than a decade at General Electric.

Newcastle tech firm PolyBox has raised a further £700,000 in funding.

The platform helps marketers to collect and report on data, giving them the ability to forecast, model and engage effectively with that data.

North East venture capital firm Northstar Ventures first invested in the company in 2024 and followed up recently with another investment of £150,000 from the North East Innovation Fund, with the support of The North East Mayoral Strategic Authority led by North East Mayor, Kim McGuinness. 

A further £250,000 came from angel investors and a £300,000 grant was secured from Innovate UK, bringing the recent total raised to £700k. It will enable the company to focus on integrating AI into its products to automate reporting and generate critical insights for customers.

In all, the company has raised £1.5m through investment and grants, including Innovate UK, Creative UK and angel investors since its pre-seed stage.  

Ossprey, a software supply chain security company helping organisations stop malicious code before it reaches production environments, has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding.

The London firm said this marks one of top three pre-seed investments in history for a UK cyber company.

The oversubscribed funding round was led by Episode 1 Ventures, with participation from Osney Capital and Octopus Ventures. It will accelerate product development, expand its engineering and commercial teams and support international growth.

Arrakis, an AI deployment company helping industrial companies install AI agents for mission-critical operations, has raised $30 million (£22m) in Series A funding.

The round was led by Blossom Capital, with participation from existing investor Accel, which also led the company’s $7.5m (£5.6m) seed round.

The round includes backing from prominent technology leaders, including Olivier Pomel, founder and chief executive of Datadog, Olivier Godement, OpenAI’s Head of business products and Junaid Hussein, founder of Cambridge Aerospace.

Founded in January 2026 by former Accel investor Rafael Quintanilla, together with co-founders Haroun Beltaifa, Romain Fouilland and Mikhail Galkov – alumni of Palantir, DeliveryHero, Revolut, Datadog and ASML – Arrakis helps industrial companies deploy AI into core operational workflows across aerospace, energy, logistics, manufacturing, construction and telecommunications markets.

Arrakis claims to combine AI engineers with a model-agnostic enterprise AI platform and applied AI research tuned to industrial operations, letting companies leverage their data to train, deploy and scale custom AI agents in weeks, not quarters. 

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A day after Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, one of his headline decisions was to fold the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology into an expanded Department for Business and Trade.

The new department, which will be known as the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology, will be led by former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.

In another sign that Burnham is keen to bring technology into mainstream decision-making, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan will be given a seat in the Cabinet, with his role straddling both the Cabinet Office and DBIST.

Narayan’s responsibilities within Sir Keir Starmer’s former government spanned AI opportunities, the AI Security Institute, semiconductors and online safety.

“AI is likely the most significant technology in human history. Its impact will dwarf other things,” Narayan wrote on X. “The best case for it is compelling beyond our dreams: a reindustrialised Britain, stronger national security, public services transformed for the better.”

However the scrapping of DSIT as a standalone entity means there is no longer a dedicated technology secretary after Liz Kendall was ousted by the new administration; and ‘digital’ has returned to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has been rebranded to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Trade body techUK and the Startup Coalition called this “the wrong change at the wrong time”.

What did figures from technology and business make of the changes?

Author: Jonathan Symcox

UK robotics firm Humanoid has become a unicorn despite being founded just two years ago.

The London company raised $152 million (£114m) investment at a $1.35 billion valuation to become Europe’s first humanoid robotics unicorn.

It is the largest ever Series A investment into a humanoid-first robotics company in Europe.

The round brings the total amount raised to date to $270m and was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglaé Ventures. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Losses have widened at IntelliAM AI Plc as it begins to expand in the United States and eyes a listing on London’s junior AIM market.

The provider of AI-driven software solutions for the manufacturing and engineering sectors – currently listed on the challenger Aquis Stock Exchange – said revenues for the year ended 31st March 2026 climbed 64% to £5.26 million. Annual recurring revenue doubled to £1.65m.

However loss before tax was £1.95m (FY25: loss of £950,000) and adjusted EBITDA loss was £910,000 (FY25: loss of £160,000), which it said “reflected planned investment in product development, sales and customer support, together with the effect of longer sales cycles for larger customer opportunities”.

Cash reserves at the year end dropped to £100,000 from almost £2m a year earlier. IntelliAM said trade receivables were approximately £1.4m at the year end.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Manchester PropTech Street Group has been valued at more than £200 million by a strategic growth investment from listed private equity investor Hg.

London-based Hg is investing £7m, with some of its institutional clients also participating in the raise through its Hg Mercury Fund.

Founded and led by siblings and co-CEOs Tom and Heather Staff, Street has built an integrated operating system which spans its core CRM (Street.co.uk), its prospecting and lead-generation platform, Spectre, and a growing suite of AI-native products including Cortex, which allows customers to build and orchestrate their own AI agents.

Today, the business serves thousands of estate and letting agency branches across the UK.

The founder siblings remain majority controlling shareholders in Street Group and will continue to lead the business.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A $1.5 billion settlement against AI giant Anthropic has been approved by a US judge.

Authors and publishers are set for payouts after judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín certified the largest ever copyright lawsuit.

However the settlement recognised that Anthropic, maker of generative AI chatbot Claude, is free to train its models on works it has legally acquired as this was judged to be fair use.

The class action of Bartz et al vs. Anthropic, filed in 2024, pertained to Anthropic training its AI models on content it had not purchased. 

Writers accused Anthropic of illegally downloading and storing millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

 

Data unveiled by NorthEdge has demonstrated its material contribution made in the regions outside of London and the South East.

The lower mid-market private equity firm’s latest Sustainability Report assessed the social and economic impact of its 18 portfolio companies – where NorthEdge is the lead investor – both on a regional and a national level.

Led by business economist Mark Gregory, the research details that NorthEdge’s portfolio companies have generated an estimated £612m of GVA (Gross Value Added) into the UK economy in 2025.

Supporting almost 9,800 UK jobs in 2025, much of the portfolio’s social and economic contribution was felt in regions outside of London and the South East, with 56% of GVA falling in the North, Midlands and Scotland.

The UK and Florida have joined forces to help space companies and researchers turn innovative ideas into commercial reality.

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the UK Government and Space Florida at the Farnborough International Airshow.

The agreement establishes a £300,000 joint fund, with a formal call for projects set to open in autumn 2026 and selections anticipated in 2027.

A Leeds-based digital security specialist which counts Leeds United among its client base has secured a £2.7 million investment from investor Maven Capital Partners.

Xentra provides IT solutions across cybersecurity, safeguarding and compliance to the education and SME markets.

Its subscription-based solutions help organisations to assess, implement and manage their security infrastructure around the clock.

The business supports over 90 customers including Leeds United, Leeds Bradford Airport, Vista Technology Support, JT Atkinson and education providers such as Shaw Education Trust.

The funding round includes investment from the Maven VCTs and NPIF II – Maven Equity Finance, which is managed by Maven Capital Partners as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II (NPIF II).

Innovate UK Business Connect is encouraging organisations from across the UK to explore opportunities to participate in a new £25 million funding competition designed to unlock greater consumer-led flexibility in the energy system.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Consumer Led Flexibility for the Clean Energy Superpower Mission competition will support ambitious projects that help homes, communities, businesses and industry play a more active role in the energy system.

While the competition will fund innovative AI, digital and end-to-end solutions, Innovate UK Business Connect is keen to engage organisations that may not traditionally work with UKRI but have valuable expertise, assets and access to communities that could strengthen project proposals.

Potential partners include charities, social housing providers, local authorities, public sector organisations, community groups and industrial businesses, all of whom can help innovators test, develop and deploy solutions in real-world environments.

Lightning Reach, a financial support portal based in London, has been acquired by European Technology Group.

ETG is described as a mission-aligned GovTech group and long-term investor.

Over 20 million people in the UK live in financially vulnerable circumstances, yet over £23 billion in financial support goes unclaimed each year, as the process is complex, slow and spread across multiple organisations. Lightning Reach was founded during Covid-19 to make accessing that support simple, through a single platform.

It has reached more than 300,000 people and facilitated over £25m in financial assistance, and is partnered with more than 100 utility providers, local authorities, charities, housing associations and banks across the UK.

With ETG’s backing, Lightning Reach says it will get long-term investment and public sector technology expertise to accelerate its goal of helping over 1 million people access financial support by 2028.

As part of the transition, COO Rhiannon Sheridan becomes CEO, with founder Ren Yi Hooi remaining involved as a director.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Half-year profits have plunged 75% at global STEM workforce consultancy SThree plc.

The London-headquartered firm says costs associated with its cutbacks are responsible for the drop. Revenue for the six months ended 31st May 2026 fell 8%.

SThree operates major hubs across Europe, the United States and Asia.