Blackbird plc has appointed another interim chair as it seeks a permanent solution.

The previous chair stepped down in June 2025, leading CEO Ian McDonough to take on the role on an interim basis.

COO and CFO Steve White then stepped down at the end of August this year.

Now the company behind cloud-native video editing platform Blackbird and collaborative video editing and content creation platform elevate.io has appointed non-exec director Youri Hazanov as interim non-executive chair “in order to follow best governance practice”.

StormHarvester, an AI-powered wastewater analytics company, has appointed international water technology executive Colby Manwaring as a board advisor.

Manwaring is the former CEO of Innovyze, a global leader in water infrastructure software, which was acquired by Autodesk in 2021 in a deal valued at approximately $1 billion.

His appointment comes as StormHarvester continues to build its international presence, with North America identified as a key market for the company’s next phase of growth.

Founded by civil engineer Brian Moloney, StormHarvester uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help wastewater utilities identify and prevent network failures before they result in flooding or environmental pollution.

The company now analyses data from more than 400,000 sensors across global customers and detects over 10,000 sewer blockages each year.

Employee benefits platform Perkbox has appointed Shahid Naveed as chief product and technology officer, bringing more than 20 years’ experience across Amazon, Freetrade and Auction Technology Group.

Previously CPTO at Freetrade, where he helped steer the business through its acquisition by IG Group, Shahid will now lead Perkbox’s 70-strong technology division, focusing on making employee benefits easier to access and helping employers get more value from their investment.

A key priority will be exploring how AI can help HR teams identify underused benefits and take action to improve engagement.

Perkbox currently supports 7,500+ organisations and nearly 4 million employees worldwide.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Fractile, a UK company aiming to build a chip to deliver exponential performance improvements for AI models, has raised £577 million in Series C funding.

Funding database platform Dealroom flagged the figure based on Companies House share allotments filed for September to October 2026. It follows a £160m round this summer.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, valued at more than $5 trillion. With demand for chips rising exponentially amid the rise of artificial intelligence, it dominates the global semiconductor market. 

Nvidia’s chips are based on GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Meanwhile Fractie, founded in 2022 by artificial intelligence PhD Walter Goodwin, takes a radically different approach. Its chips are designed for AI inference that it claims can deliver transformational improvements in performance for frontier AI models in deployment.

According to Bloomberg, frontier AI model firm Anthropic – maker of Claude – has placed an initial order with Fractile for $250 million in chips. The company expects to deploy its chips in data centres in 2027.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A new pilot scheme has been launched to accelerate 200 high-growth companies based around the UK.

Ambitious businesses from across Britain are urged to apply for Scale UK Connect to access support from a network of partners across a 12-month period.

The 200 companies will get expert account management and tailored advice on how to expand. The programme will also include new ways to network with fellow founders, investors and major funds, opening up new trade opportunities at home and abroad. 

The pilot aims to develop a pipeline of high-growth companies to follow in the footsteps of UK success stories like Quantexa and Synthesia.

The announcement is one piece in a major package of support for entrepreneurs announced in Chancellor John Healey’s Budget, including Founders’ Relief – largely welcomed by the business community – and a step change in how procurement will support UK industry and innovation. 

The package aims to address practical barriers founders and high-growth firms continue to face: finding customers, accessing capital, attracting exceptional talent and navigating government. 

The Scale UK Connect pilot will be led by growth agency London & Partners. Regional delivery partners include the Manchester Growth Company; the West Midlands Growth Company; TechSPARK in the South West; Tech SY in Yorkshire; and Pathways Forward in Scotland.

Recruitment for the pilot runs from now until January 2027. The cohort launches in February 2027; firms get 12 months of support; and a final report is due in April 2028.

 

EDX Medical Group plc, which develops and supplies innovative digital diagnostic products and services to improve the early detection and treatment of major diseases, has appointed Professor Michael John Owen as its non-executive chairman.  

Professor Owen succeeds with immediate effect non-executive chairman Jason Holt, who has led the board since the company’s inception and is stepping down owing to a need for increasing focus on other chairman roles and charitable interests.

A highly experienced R&D executive and non-executive director, Professor Owen has a broad knowledge of the pharma industry and of the finance community that supports life sciences. He is currently an independent member of a number of boards of BioTech companies and an adviser to several investment partnerships.

He has also held senior executive positions, notably as co-founder and chief scientific officer of Kymab Limited, a biopharmaceutical company ultimately acquired by Sanofi, as well as several senior leadership positions at GlaxoSmithKline.

AI, business innovation and career development were at the heart of School of Coding & AI’s (SoC) contribution to Birmingham Tech Week 2026, with a programme of events exploring how emerging technologies can support learning, drive business growth and open up pathways into the technology sector.

SoC, one of the UK’s fastest-growing education providers, took part in two events exploring the role of AI in education and business, hosted a speed mentoring event in partnership with Birmingham Muslims in Tech, welcomed over 140 attendees to its Women in Tech event, and attended the Scale Up Summit in the city.

The events reflected SoC’s commitment to connecting education with industry, helping businesses understand the opportunities presented by emerging technologies, and creating more accessible pathways into the technology sector. 

 

Liverpool City Region is putting its ambition to lead in ‘AI for Good’ into practice, with technology developed by a local business helping international visitors explore the destination in 99 languages.

Following this week’s third annual AI Summit, the region has a success story rooted in the event itself. A meeting between Mayor Steve Rotheram and Liverpool-based Sum Vivas founders Rob Sims and Denise Harris at the inaugural summit led to the development of Jimmy, the region’s AI visitor guide.

The collaboration between Sum Vivas, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and the region’s Destination Partnership now allows visitors to plan their trip through the Visit Liverpool website by speaking or typing in their own language. Following installations at the Gerry Marsden Ferry Terminal and Southport Station, Jimmy is set to welcome passengers at Liverpool Lime Street.

Sum Vivas reports that Jimmy has already handled more than 10,000 interactions.

Open Cosmos has appointed Natasha Dillon as chief people officer as the company scales on the back of a €300 million funding round and accelerates plans to build a 192-satellite strong connectivity constellation.

She will lead people strategy behind one of Europe’s fastest growing space tech companies, attracting and retaining the talent it needs to expand internationally while keeping the entrepreneurial culture it has had since 2015.

Natasha brings close to 30 years of experience, having spent seven years as CPO at Inmarsat, winning the chief HR Officer of the Year Award for Innovation in 2018, then leading people and talent across 70 portfolio companies at Apax Partners.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Hannah Smith has taken over the managing director role at managed service provider Red Rock.

Founder Paul James has handed the reins of the Greater Manchester business to 26-year-old Smith, who previously ran its operations.

Smith spoke at our FUEL Manchester breakfast event yesterday and also took part in the masterclasses which followed. She told the audience that appearing at in-person events was a crucial part of their marketing strategy.

 

A South Wales technology business is accelerating the development of its artificial intelligence capabilities and targeting further growth with support from HSBC UK. 

de Novo Solutions, based in Newport, will use a seven-figure funding package from HSBC UK to invest in its technology and intellectual property as it enters its next stage of expansion. 

The business extends the Oracle Cloud and ServiceNow technology platforms to deliver industry cloud solutions that meet the specific needs of organisations across local and central government, policing and education.

 

Illumion, a University of Cambridge spinout developing advanced battery imaging technology, has raised £1.7 million in funding.

Illumion is commercialising charge photometry, a novel battery imaging technology that acts like a window into working batteries. Its first product, illumionONE, allows researchers to observe how individual battery particles behave during charge and discharge, providing insights that are difficult to capture with conventional testing methods. 

The company is also developing illumionX, a next-generation platform designed to help industrial battery teams translate those insights into faster development cycles and better quality-control decisions.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The business ecosystem has backed the announcement of a Founders’ Relief initiative in today’s Budget.

John Healey delivered his first fiscal plan as Chancellor alongside Prime Minister Andy Burnham and the capital gains tax relief stole headlines among businesses and those who support them.

The relief will apply a 10% rate of CGT to qualifying disposals of shares, up to a lifetime limit of £10 million of gains per individual. 

The Government said this will incentivise those whose records, creativity and resilience in building successful businesses mean they have the potential to deliver even more UK jobs, growth and wider economic benefits in future.

It has launched a consultation seeking views on how the proposed individual, company and growth and innovation conditions will work for this in practice.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Tech entrepreneurs have called for the Chancellor to “change Britain’s ambition and appetite for risk” in his first Budget today.

In a video address ahead of the unveiling of his first fiscal plan alongside Prime Minister Andy Burham, John Healey pledged to provide “breathing space” to businesses and households.

He also promised to deliver long-term measures to “get energy costs down for good” and to “strengthen national security and our defences”. 

“We’ll do all of this responsibly, sticking within tight fiscal rules, and make sure every pound is well invested,” he said.

However Steven Mendel and Laura Ashford, co-founders of Lateral – a private health insurance startup for active over-60s – want to see a more radical plan to back entrepreneurs.

“The Chancellor talks about backing entrepreneurs, but I’d like to know whether this Budget has done anything meaningful to change Britain’s ambition and appetite for risk,” they said.

“We’re asking people to take enormous personal and financial risks to build the businesses that will drive our future growth. Yet too often the incentives facing those same people seem designed to encourage them to work less, earn less and play it safe.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Private equity giant Accel-KKR’s £207 million takeover of historic firm Eleco plc has been given the green light by shareholders.

Eleco, founded in 1895, has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since the start of World War II.

Early in this century it entered the built environment software market with a series of acquisitions and in 2013 divested its remaining building systems and precast concrete businesses, making it a software-focused group.

 

Cortile, an end-to-end platform for UK residential property management, has appointed former Checkatrade head of AI services James Hamilton as general manager and HomeViews co-founder Hannah Marsh as head of marketing. 

The business was co-founded in 2019 by Manchester-based property and technology entrepreneur Akeel Malik. It has since attracted clients including Pinnacle Group, RMG and Urban Splash and is now trusted by managing agents overseeing more than 400,000 homes across the UK. 

Its technology development has been supported by Innovate UK, the UK government’s innovation agency. 

JJ Double Gold, a fitness and recovery natural nutrient business founded by double Olympic Taekwondo gold medallist Jade Jones OBE with tech entrepreneur Richard Groves, has agreed a landmark deal with York-based CBD wellness business HempWell Ltd.

JJ Double Gold has acquired an equity stake in HempWell in a move that will see a phased multi-million-pound investment over the next three years. 

The deal will accelerate Hempwell’s growth and enable JJ Double Gold to enter new markets for the first time, including the supply of natural CBD-led vitamins, minerals and wellness products designed to support overall mental and physical wellbeing.

 

Machenta, a frontier AI company building a new kind of foundation model for robots, has raised a £30 million seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures.

People are remarkably good at learning new physical tasks: show someone how to do something once and, in many cases, they can do it straight away. However, robots today are very different, and teaching them a new task usually takes several days or weeks. 

First, hundreds or thousands of human demonstrations of the task are collected, then the model is trained on this data, and finally after waiting for all this, the robot can perform the task by itself.

Machenta has built a foundational model designed to eliminate that intelligence gap between humans and robots, and to achieve ‘instant learning’. 

Utilising this model, the firm says, if a robot sees just one demonstration of a task, it can perform the task immediately afterwards – instantly adapting to entirely new variations of the task. There is no need to wait for further demonstrations or training. 

 

Lovey, which claims to be the UK’s fastest-growing FinTech and financial services provider, has announced a senior secured credit facility of up to £250 million with Pollen Street Capital.

The facility is made up of £50m committed capital and a £200m accordion, making it the largest funding facility in the Birmingham firm’s history.

Lovey is a finance provider focused on SME funding. The facility will significantly increase its lending capacity, supporting the business as it scales its own-book lending while continuing to grow its established brokerage proposition.

Founded by Jack Smith in 2016, Lovey has grown from a one-person start-up into a 120-strong business, funding more than £600m in loans to over 11,000 UK SMEs. 

THG Fulfil, a provider of Software-as-a-Service technology, robotics and operations platforms built for global eCommerce, has extended its partnership with CDS Superstores.

CDS trades as The Range, wilko and Homebase.

The multi-year contract extension builds on a partnership that began in 2024, in which THG Fulfil provides fulfilment and courier management services for the home, leisure and garden retailer.