Author: Chris Maguire

Peter Cliff and Jos van der Steen tell the first episode of The Naked Founder podcast how they went from arch-enemies to best friends and eventually co-founders of CONDUCTR.

CONDUCTR creates world-class, ‘kick-ass attractions’ from its Manchester HQ and in four years, the startup has grown turnover to £26m and staff numbers to 100, with studios in the UK, US and Middle East.

The two are best friends inside and outside work, and Cliff was one of the best men at van der Steen’s recent wedding.

However, when they first met, the only fireworks they created were the kind that had colleagues running for cover.

“There was quite a lot of friction when we first started,”  Cliff told The Naked Founder podcast about their early encounters at Holovis, which designs and builds immersive experiences for theme parks, attractions and visitor destinations.

“We just wanted to own the voice in the room and be the direction of it.

“There was quite a lot of bickering in the room and side conversations had to be had as people were mediating our opinions.”

For his part, van der Steen recalled: “We saw each other as threats – both ambitious with strong personalities.”

However, their enmity quickly turned to respect and a firm friendship, which often saw Cliff sleep on van der Steen’s couch during visits to Manchester.

Today, the only couch they share is in the offices at their Trafford HQ, where they run one of the UK’s most highly regarded immersive technology businesses.

You can watch the episode here 

GlobalData Plc has announced a new share buyback programme of up to a maximum consideration of £10 million.

The UK data giant moved to the main market of the London Stock Exchange earlier this month after reporting a rise in annual revenues.

It was individually targeted by PE firms KKR and ICG for takeovers last summer, but those talks collapsed.

The buyback programme is expected to commence today and be completed before the company’s interim results are published.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

YFM Equity Partners has invested in Aura Life, a digital provider of funeral plans and end-of-life planning services.

Aura was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Paul Jameson alongside his son Dave Jameson and Ben May following Paul’s diagnosis with motor neurone disease and his experience navigating end-of-life planning. 

The business was established to address the lack of compassionate, transparent and digitally-enabled options available to consumers.

In 2017, Paul was given six months to live after he was diagnosed with MND. His wife Jess, a GP, had urged him to seek medical advice after he began experiencing slurred speech.

He wrote a bucket list which saw him climb Mont Blanc in the Alps; play the world’s highest game of tennis after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; and ride 110 miles in a day around Lake Geneva.

Almost nine years after his diagnosis, the father-of-three from Godalming, Surrey is still with us, although he is wheelchair-bound and has been unable to speak for the past six years.

In 2019 he founded Aura, which operates a digital-first, asset-light model, combining a specialist support team with proprietary technology to help customers plan and arrange funerals with clarity and ease. 

UK geophysical company Metatek has successfully completed an Initial Public Offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange, for total gross proceeds to the business of C$35.0 million.

Milton Keynes-based Metatek is a worldwide leader in data acquisition, processing and interpretation services for air, land and sea geophysical / geological exploration activities.

Using technology such as airborne Full Tensor Gravity Gradiometry (FTG) instruments to create 3D imaging of the sub-surface for natural resource exploration, the company is the world’s only licensed operator of the latest generations of this industry-leading technology.

The flotation is the first tech IPO Canada has seen in five years.

IW Capital has invested in Lucida Medical, a UK-based healthtech company using AI to help clinicians diagnose prostate cancer from MRI scans faster and more accurately. The £8.7m funding round includes participation from existing investors, XTX Ventures
and Macmillan Cancer Support.

Lucida’s AI-powered diagnostic service is already working within the NHS to transform diagnostics at a time when cancer rates are rising and radiology capacity is failing to keep pace.

The ability to read MRI scans quickly and efficiently has become central to prostate cancer diagnoses and treatment pathways but, as the Royal College of Radiologists estimates, there is currently a 30% shortfall in clinical radiologists across the UK – a shortfall which could rise to 40% by 2028. As a result, cancer scans are taking longer to read which can mean weeks of anxiety for patients, an increased likelihood of later-stage diagnoses and higher treatment complexity and cost.

Aspire Technology Solutions, one of the UK’s leading providers of managed IT, cyber security, and modern workplace solutions, has completed the acquisition of managed service provider NVT Group, headquartered in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire.

The deal marks the company’s third acquisition in two years, reinforcing its strategic expansion across the UK, with a strengthened market position in Scotland.

The acquisition forms part of Aspire’s continued UK growth strategy, further scaling its presence in Scotland and enhancing its ability to deliver secure, integrated technology solutions. NVT Group supports over 90 organisations and brings a highly experienced team of 49 employees, alongside long-standing customer relationships.

All employees have transferred to Aspire as part of the transaction, and the combined team will operate from the Glasgow hub under Aspire’s leadership, with services integrated into its delivery model.

Theia Insights, a Cambridge-based deeptech whose technology is used by global index providers, asset managers, hedge funds and banks, has raised £6 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by MiddleGame Ventures, an early-stage fintech fund, with participation from Further Ventures and Unusual Ventures, bringing total funding to $14.5m to date.

Named after the Greek goddess of sight, Theia was built on the premise that financial markets cannot allocate capital well if they cannot first see the economy clearly.

Theia’s proprietary technology reads a broad range of company information – regulatory filings, earnings transcripts, press releases, financials – and builds a continuously-updated, multidimensional picture of what that company actually does.

Instead of one label, a single company might show 30% exposure to semiconductor, 25% to AI, 20% to data centres, 15% to cloud computing, and 10% to autonomous vehicle technologies, for example.

Avian Ecology, an ecological consultancy specialising in the renewables sector, has opened its new HQ at Sci-Tech Daresbury, bringing 28 employees to its growing campus community.

Avian Ecology has joined the growing campus community of over 160 businesses at Sci-Tech Daresbury, which is located in the Liverpool City Region.

The business has taken over 2,000 square feet of floorspace in Techspace Two, a two-storey grade-A office building on the campus.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The British Business Bank has announced a new £10m commitment through its Regional Angels Programme to Empirical Ventures, bringing its total support to £15m.

This partnership will accelerate Empirical’s mission to back the best venture scientists in the UK. Empirical Ventures was built to solve a specific problem: exceptional scientists often lack investors who speak their language.

Empirical’s Venture Scientist thesis suggests that the most valuable companies of the next century will not be built by generalist entrepreneurs, but by deep domain experts who can navigate the boundary between fundamental research and commercial reality.

The commitment from the British Business Bank will allow Empirical Ventures to write high-conviction cheques to these founders across the UK.

The British Business Bank has invested £8.5 million in Dexory, a provider of real-time warehouse data intelligence and autonomous solutions, as part of its recent Series C funding round.

The round was led by Eurazeo with participation from LTS Growth and Endeavor Catalyst, alongside existing investors Atomico, DTCP, Latitude Ventures, Lakestar, Elaia, Wave-X and others.

Dexory is a full stack business using autonomous robots to scan warehouses, feeding data into its AI-powered digital twin platform, DexoryView, to give supply chain and logistics companies full visibility of their operations. This allows them to track stock levels, reduce errors and optimise space utilisation.

Feasibly, a VC-backed climate AI startup founded by Beth Holloway and Leo Thomson, has been selected by David Skaith, Mayor of York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority (YNYCA) to receive £112,831 to build a geospatial AI platform that supports regional renewable energy planning.

YNYCA is driving one of England’s most ambitious regional decarbonisation programmes, with a commitment to becoming England’s first Carbon Negative region by 2040, backed by a multi-million pound investment programme. Delivering on that ambition requires an unprecedented acceleration in local renewable energy deployment – and that begins with knowing where to build.

Even after the most significant overhaul of the UK’s grid connections process in decades, the reformed grid queue still contains over 380GW of generation and storage projects competing for connection – nearly double the clean capacity the country needs by 2030.

The queue isn’t simply too large; it reflects a deeper problem: identifying which sites, at which scale, on which network infrastructure, can realistically connect within a viable timeframe. This requires manually cross-referencing DNO constraint maps, planning designation layers, land registry records, agricultural classification, and flood risk data. It is a process that takes weeks per site and demands specialist knowledge, meaning thousands of genuinely viable local energy projects never get assessed at all.

Feasibly’s platform changes that. Rather than retrieving and displaying data for a human to interpret, it deploys an AI agent that runs deep geospatial analysis autonomously – querying live network datasets, cross-referencing planning and land classification layers, and reasoning across the full picture of what makes a site viable. It is agentic AI applied to the physical world: given a location, the agent works through the same analytical process an expert would, returning a structured site assessment in seconds that explains not just whether a project is worth pursuing, but precisely why.

Author: Chris Maguire

The boss of Debenhams Group has said the turnaround of the fashion retailer is ahead of plan as the focus now switches to growth.

Debenhams Group is an online platform across five shopping destinations: Debenhams, Karen Millen, boohoo, MAN and PLT.

In an upbeat trading update this morning, the board announced its forecast delivery of £53m adjusted EBITDA in the financial year to February 28^th, 2026 – described as being ‘comfortably ahead’ of the previously upgraded guidance in January.

This year-on-year 36 per cent increase in full year adjusted EBITDA is driven by a 76 per cent increase in H2 adjusted EBITDA.

Boohoo’s share price went up from 17.5p to 18.5p on early trading upon the news.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The takeover saga at listed FinTech CAB Payments has intensified after an activist shareholder accused the company’s independent board of acting against the interests of shareholders.

Last month investor Helios Consortium said it was considering making an improved £213 million bid for the London-listed FinTech. However board members excluding Nitin Kaul and Henry Obi CBE – who represent the interests of Helios – rejected this initial approach.

StoneX, a Fortune 500 payments firm listed on New York’s Nasdaq exchange, then said it was considering a bid of £241m for CAB. The independent board also rejected that approach, again claiming that it significantly undervalued the firm and its future prospects.

Now CAB has accused Helios of “launching an unsolicited firm offer for CAB Payments at an unrecommendable value” and said this is “highly opportunistic”.

Pointing to the higher value of the StoneX offer, it said it “would encourage the Helios Consortium to consider proposals at a premium to its own offer that could be in the best interests of the company’s shareholders as a whole, including minority shareholders”.

However Helios called on CAB to provide it with specific, non-public information which is required when formalising a bid with regulators, saying it had so far refused to do so.

“The Helios Consortium considers this stance to be against the interests of CAB Payments shareholders,” it added. 

Outgoing BBC director-general Tim Davie has been appointed as the next co-chair of the Creative Industries Council.

The council is a forum that brings industry and the government together to ensure the continued success of the UK’s creative economy. It aims to unite the sector and give them a clearer voice when advocating to the government.

Sir Peter Bazalgette will leave his position as co-chair when his term ends on 31 July, and Baroness Shriti Vadera on 31 December. Their tenures as co-chairs saw the government introduce a new growth blueprint for their sectors through the Creative Industries Sector Plan, published as part of the Industrial Strategy. Davie will join Vadera as co-chair from 1 August and become the sole industry chair upon her departure.

Davie will lead the council alongside co-chairs Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Business Secretary Peter Kyle. Under Davie, the council will continue to focus on Sector Plan priorities – including innovation, access to finance, workforce, trade and investment.

accesso Technology Group plc, a technology solutions provider to leisure, entertainment and cultural markets, has acquired Dexibit Limited, a purpose-built data analytics and artificial intelligence platform for the visitor attractions industry.

Dexibit’s capabilities will form the foundation of a new solution, accesso Intelligence, which will empower accesso’s clients to connect their full operational dataset, including third-party systems, and deliver actionable insight across their entire business.

The agreement, funded through the group’s existing cash reserves, is for an initial cash consideration of up to $7.1m. A potential additional consideration of up to $5m is also payable over a three-year period, subject to the satisfaction of certain performance conditions.

accesso has also published its 2025 results.

Revenue was £155.1m, an increase of 1.8% on 2024, while statutory profit before tax was £14.3m, a rise of 37.7%.

Author: Chris Maguire

Carl Ennis is leaving his role as chief executive of Siemens UK.

Ennis, who has spent more than 25 years at the technology giant, will leave on April 30.

He started his career at Rochdale Training 41 years ago and was appointed CEO of Siemens UK in January 2020.

As CEO of Siemens UK, he has worked closely with customers, partners and colleagues across the region and beyond.

Commenting on his decision, Ennis said: “It has been a real privilege to be part of Siemens for so long and to work alongside many talented people.

“As someone who aspired to be a car mechanic, making it to country CEO of one of the most influential technology companies on the planet is pretty cool.

“A formal process is now underway to identify my successor. I am not going just yet, and there will be more to come over the next few weeks. I am looking forward to seeing as many colleagues, customers and partners as possible before I step down.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Identity specialist GB Group plc has announced a £175 million refinancing deal.

The business, led by CEO Dev Dhiman (pictured), signed the revolving credit facility with major banks after reporting a large drop in six-month profits late last year.

The new facility will mature in September 2030, replacing the existing secured facility due to mature in July 2027. In addition, the new RCF contains two optional one-year maturity extension options.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shirine Khoury-Haq has resigned as CEO of the Co-op after the group posted £126 million annual losses.

It follows a BBC report in February which aired warnings from senior managers of a “toxic culture” at executive level.

The 180-year-old member-owned food and services group, which has a reputation for upholding ethical values, faced allegations that it created “fear and alienation” among several senior staff.

On Thursday the group said a massive cyber-attack last year cost it an estimated £285m in sales.

Author: Chris Maguire

Conor Galvin and Levi Hague were fired in the latest dramatic episode of The Apprentice.

They found themselves in the losing team after all the candidates were required to sell products live on TV.

Lord Sugar and his grandson Joe watched on as the two teams tried to secure sales.

Estate agent Kieran McCartney survived another trip back into the boardroom after saying he’ll be project manager in the next task  – and he’ll walk if he fails.

There are now just seven candidates left vying for Lord Sugar’s £250k investment and mentorship.

Galvin said: “I was disappointed to be fired, but I thought as project manager, when I got no sales, my head was definitely on the chopping block.”

Asked how it felt to be fired, Yorkshireman Hague said: “I weren’t shocked if I’m honest, I sort of expected it to come. Lord Sugar tends to invest in things like recruitment, trades and beauty brands, and when I came in with personalised pet cremation urns it’s quite a niche industry that a lot of people don’t really know about yet.

“I understood it might not be something he fully saw the potential in straight away. So when I was fired, I wasn’t upset, I was actually quite relieved and ready to get back home to my business, my wife and my six-month-old daughter.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Autotrader and Just Eat are among five companies being investigated by the competitions watchdog as part of a crackdown on fake and misleading reviews.

The marketplace platforms are among five companies which may have infringed consumer law, says the Competition and Markets Authority.

In April 2025, several practices relating to online reviews became ‘banned practices’ under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, meaning they are automatically deemed unfair and illegal. 

This includes obtaining and posting fake reviews, and paid-for reviews that are not clearly marked as incentivised. It also covers how reviews are handled – for example, if negative reviews are hidden, or if star ratings present an inaccurate picture.