Phones 4u founder John Caudwell and former Marks & Spencer boss Lord Stuart Rose have joined over 150 business leaders & parliamentarians calling on ministers to ‘stop the creep of taxes on Britain’s businesses’.

The two men are the most prominent of a wave of influential backers of founder group Helm’s Stop the Creep campaign, alongside Christos Angelides, CEO of fashion retailer Reiss, and Charlie Mullins, who founded Pimlico Plumbers.

In an open letter they say they want the Government to make the Autumn Budget on 28th October the moment it delivers on its pro-growth promises.

 

Board Intelligence, the board technology and advisory firm, has appointed Christopher Tacey-Green as its first chief technology officer.

He joins from international bank and wealth manager Investec, where he was head of engineering.

A former founder who has built and scaled technology from the ground up, Tacey-Green combines deep expertise in AI, cloud, and machine learning with over ten years’ experience leading high-performance development teams.

Board Intelligence recently expanded into AI-powered legal technology with the acquisition of Juristic in July 2026 and the promotion of Anders Gröndahl to senior vice president, AI transformation & performance.

Two new schemes are to launch in Barnsley to help residents use AI in simple, practical ways – from applying for jobs and preparing for interviews, to training for roles where digital and AI tools are becoming part of day-to-day work.

AI Career Launchpad will offer flexible training and paid work placements with employers, while the Getting Job Ready with AI pilot will support jobseekers.

This comes six months after Barnsley became the UK’s first government-designated Tech Town.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies plc has appointed a new chief development and product officer.

The nanopore-based molecular sensing firm said David Miller will join at the start of next month while Conor McKechnie will join as chief marketing and communications officer on 1^st October.

Miller joins Oxford Nanopore from Pacific Biosciences, where he served as head of research & development and vice president, global marketing. Prior to that, he held senior product leadership roles at Illumina, including responsibility for major platform launches.  

McKechnie​ joins from Cytiva, where he has served as group vice president, marketing. He previously held senior marketing, communications and public affairs roles at GE Healthcare.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Madrid tech firm has acquired Manchester-headquartered Skyrise.

Taptap Digital says Skyrise complements its AI-powered location intelligence platform with one of the UK’s most advanced privacy-first audience design capabilities.

The combined offering enables advertisers to identify, activate, and measure audiences more effectively without relying on cookies or personal identifiers, delivering deeper insights and stronger business outcomes.

Skyrise will operate under its own brand as part of Taptap Digital. CEO Paul Barnard, who has led the business since 2023, will remain in his role alongside the existing management team. 

The acquisition will see Skyrise founders Ian Vint, Michelle Vint and Alex Petrie exit the business.

Leeds Digital Festival has unveiled plans for its 11th edition, placing the event at the heart of economic and commercial expansion across the city region’s thriving technology sector.

The organisers are preparing to deliver the most varied schedule in the festival’s history, bringing together domestic businesses, international tech firms and investors to build on the area’s reputation as a primary engine for northern innovation.

A new study by The Data City shows the sector’s growth is also outpacing the national picture when compared with any other local authority outside London. Leeds tech companies are expanding at an estimated 8.3% a year, compared with a UK average of 8.1%, while almost one in eight (13%) are classified as high-growth, posting annual growth rates above 20%. 

Altogether, the Leeds tech sector is estimated to contribute £1.67 billion in gross value added, at a scale and pace of growth that the city’s digital community will put centre stage at Leeds Digital Festival.

Taking place from 21st September to 2nd October, the UK’s largest open-platform tech event will bring together thousands of entrepreneurs, tech leaders, software developers and global investors. The 2026 programme aims to eclipse previous attendance records and build on a decade of growth that has established Leeds as one of the premier technology hubs outside London.

This year marks a significant transition for the festival leadership team, with Deb Hetherington taking charge for the first time as director, succeeding long-serving founder Stuart Clarke MBE, who is now chair.

Embedd, a startup building infrastructure for physical AI, has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding led by Seedcamp. 

It is already working with multiple semiconductor firms, most recently partnering with Microchip Technology. 

From cars to medical devices, nearly $19 billion has been invested in robotics and physical AI so far this year. Yet every intelligent machine encounters the same bottleneck before it can operate – the software running underneath it must communicate reliably with dozens of different chips, none of which share a common language.

Embedd automates that layer. Instead of engineers reading thousands of pages of documentation and hand-writing the code, Embedd creates a digital twin of the hardware, giving its AI agents the context to run the integration, and generates the code that makes each chip usable by the software above it.

The London-based deep tech company says it has enabled customers to deliver production-ready software for chips up to six times faster.

Embedd was founded by Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs Michael Lazarenko, Maxim Gorinov and Valentin Gololobov after their previous hardware company was hit by chip shortages during Covid and later disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Forced to repeatedly rewrite software for newly sourced components, the founders recognised a bottleneck they believed would only worsen as AI moved into the physical world.

SCALE has appointed Amy Knight as chief communications officer and director.

Knight has been promoted from her previous role as communications director and has also become a shareholder in the business.

The move recognises Knight’s contribution to SCALE’s development, including her work founding and developing its female-focused platform, Women Who Scale.

Five of the UK’s most innovative startups have been selected to compete in the live Cambridge Tech Week Pitching Competition this September.

The finalists were selected from a shortlist representing 20 of the UK’s most exciting, DeepTech innovations across artificial intelligence, biotechnology, sustainable energy, MedTech and AgriTech.

They are HotHouse Therapeutics, HutanBio, Lambda Energy, Myonerv and Xplore Intelligence.

Law firm Freeths has announced the appointment of John Jones as its new CTO.

Jones will work across Freeths’ 12 UK offices. With more than 30 years’ experience in technology and professional services, he brings a strong track record in leading complex IT environments and large‑scale transformation programmes.

He began his career as a software developer, working on business‑critical applications before progressing into senior leadership roles within professional services firms. Most recently, he served as CTO at Forvis Mazars, having previously held senior technology positions at BDO.

Contollo Group has strengthened its senior team with the appointment of Matthew Mackey FRICS as director.

The firm says it signals a major step in the group’s ambition to redefine the UK construction consultancy market.

Mackey joins Contollo following nearly three decades in senior commercial leadership roles across the UK and Australia, bringing deep expertise in cost planning, procurement reform, benchmarking, Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) strategy, digital transformation and commercial leadership. 

His advisory work spans major programmes and developments across healthcare, aviation, commercial offices, sport, education, retail banking and infrastructure in both the UK and Australia.

Ripjar, the provider of smarter screening and risk intelligence solutions, has appointed Conrad Nicholas as chief product officer and Katie Miller as VP marketing.

Nicholas joins from Droit, where, as head of product for pre-trade compliance, he led the product line through a period in which the company’s revenue doubled, ahead of its acquisition by FIS. Previously, he spent 12 years at UBS and began his career at Accenture.

Miller spent over seven years at AML Analytics as group head of marketing and communications, spanning the financial crime, RegTech and supervisory technology sectors.

Made Smarter has bolstered its North West team with four new specialists as SME manufacturers accelerate investment in technology and skills.

Mike Richards-Brown and Tabs Khojani will help firms find practical ways to digitalise their operations, while Jane Duffy and Mike Connolly will help businesses prepare their people and develop the leadership needed to deliver change.

Together they bring decades of experience from some of the region’s leading manufacturing, technology and business support organisations.

Richards-Brown joins following roles at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre North West (AMRC NW) and the North of England Robotics Innovation Centre (NERIC).

Khojani brings 20 years of experience in Greater Manchester’s innovation and business support sector and also joins from NERIC at the University of Salford.

Duffy previously supported businesses through the Business Growth Hub across Greater Manchester, while Connolly, a Mechanical Engineer, has spent more than three decades with global manufacturer Hubbell, working across engineering, quality, operations and HR.

Their recruitment to the Government-backed adoption programme comes as manufacturers face growing pressure to become more productive, overcome skills challenges and keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies.

New registrations rose 49% last year, with a further 128 manufacturers coming forward in the first five months of 2026/27.

The new recruits will work alongside Made Smarter’s existing team to help companies develop a digital roadmap and decide where and how to invest, including accessing match-funded grants of up to £20,000.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Technology entrepreneur Rudi Kesic has launched a new venture, ClearPath AI, in Birmingham.

Described as an AI-native operating system for legal and professional services, the startup claims to have won £1 million pre-seed backing from entrepreneurs and senior industry figures.

Kesic chose Birmingham as the commercial home for the company and plans to create more than 20 new roles in the UK, while its technology operation is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The founder grew up in Coventry and has spent much of his professional life working in Birmingham and across the region.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Transport technology provider Tracsis has completed its £48 million acquisition of Mistral Data, a wholly owned subsidiary of FirstGroup plc.

Listed Leeds company Tracsis said the deal completed yesterday following clearance from the Competition and Markets Authority. 

Days after the deal was initially announced last month, Tracsis sold its events transport planning and management business to Connection Capital for £7.25m cash.

This morning Tracsis also reported that group revenue for its latest financial year is expected to be £85.5m (2025: £81.9m), with adjusted EBITDA of £13.5m (2025: £12.6m).

In both cases, the figures include the full-year contribution from the events business it sold.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A new interim CFO has been appointed at SkinBioTherapeutics plc following the departure of the figure who triggered a probe into the actions of ex-CEO Stuart Ashman.

The Newcastle firm, developing gut-based products which promote skin health, was thrown into crisis earlier this year.

Emily Bertram, who joined as CFO in 2025, escalated concerns that results had been misrepresented, leading to the departure of Ashman, who had joined the company as CEO in 2024. Its share price also dropped from around 20 pence to 5p.

Bertram decided to leave the company at the end of June, with interim CEO Rachel Parsonage hailing her “diligence and professional integrity” in identifying and escalating issues to the board.

Now Anita Slater has been appointed interim CFO – a non-board role – for an initial six-month term, starting immediately.

Blackbird plc has announced that Steve White, the company’s chief operating and financial officer, will step down from his role on 31st August 2026 in order to pursue new opportunities.

The firm has developed a browser-based collaborative video editor, elevate.io.

Chris McDonald MP has been confirmed as the new Minister with responsibility for intellectual property.

This follows his appointment as Minister of State (Minister for Science, Innovation and Investment) jointly in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade last month.

Oshen, a British robotics company building a persistent sensing layer for the world’s oceans, is tripling its manufacturing rate to meet demand from navies, weather agencies and ocean scientists. Its swarms of one-metre wind-and solar powered vessels deliver real-time ocean intelligence for security, climate and infrastructure.

Navies procure a handful of billion-dollar ships in single digits over decades and spend much of their time tracking submarine activity across the North Atlantic. Oshen’s bet is that the job needs the opposite – thousands of cheap, expendable, mass-produced robots, built like compute hardware, at sea.

Oshen’s customers and partners now include the US Navy’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France and VOTO, the Swedish ocean-monitoring body. Its C-star production has scaled to match. The company initially took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars, and now builds 15 every six weeks with a standardising system that allows a new technician to assemble parts in less than half an hour so it can be replicated at multiple sites.

Finova, the UK’s largest provider of cloud-based mortgage, savings and lending software, has appointed Tom Tredwell as director of data.

Tredwell joins from Shawbrook Bank, bringing more than 20 years’ experience across the mortgage industry, specialising in data, reporting and analytics.

His career spans entrepreneurial startups and established financial institutions, including serving as a founding shareholder of The Mortgage Lender before its acquisition by Shawbrook.