An Australian startup is launching in Britain with a simple proposition: learner drivers should not only ask whether they have driven enough, but whether they have experienced enough different driving.

Waylo is a free app designed for learner drivers and the family members or supervising drivers who practise with them between professional lessons.

Rather than focusing primarily on test routes, lesson management or a simple total of hours behind the wheel, Waylo builds a picture of the learner’s real-world driving experience across different road types, conditions, traffic levels and situations.

The app can automatically capture practice drives, show learners where their experience is broadening and where gaps remain, and suggest routes intended to add useful new experience.

Luca Bocchio has been appointed as a partner at Balderton, where he will focus on early-stage investments.

Bocchio joins the firm after more than a decade as an investor in the European technology ecosystem, most recently as a partner at Accel, where he focused on a broad range of industries from FinTech and consumer to, more recently, AI applications, defence and energy.

He has backed a number of category-defining European businesses including Trade Republic, SumUp, Vinted and Fuse Energy.

Prior to becoming an investor, her advised technology and consumer companies at Bain & Co. across Europe and Asia.

Entrepreneurs across Wolverhampton and the Black Country are set to benefit from a new NatWest Accelerator launched at the University of Wolverhampton.

The programme is designed to help people start, grow and scale businesses by connecting them with expert coaching, peer networks, investor connections and specialist support through NatWest’s community of more than 30,000 entrepreneurs across the UK.

The new hub gives ambitious founders access to support on their doorstep, helping turn local ideas into thriving businesses and creating new opportunities for growth across the region.

The launch was marked by a live pitch competition, where founders competed for a share of £100,000 to help accelerate their businesses. Among the winners was Rebecca Bognold, founder of Midlands-based Fibraxis, which is developing treatments for people living with lung damage caused by asthma.

Author: Chris Maguire

A new independent awards programme dedicated to recognising outstanding women across the North East has officially opened for entries and nominations today (September 14).

The North East Women of Excellence Awards will celebrate women creating impact through business, leadership, innovation and community across the whole of the North East.

The awards are the brainchild of Sophie Milliken MBE, who was included in BusinessCloud’s 2026 Northern Leaders list.

The awards have been created to fill a clear gap in the region, with no other independent North East-wide awards programme dedicated solely to recognising the achievements and contribution of women.

Entries and nominations are now open across 15 award categories spanning founders, leadership and workplaces, public service, mentoring, community impact, equality, diversity and inclusion, and wider role models.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Brave Bison has upped its takeover offer for fellow listed firm System1 to £47.5 million despite seeming opposition from the former’s biggest shareholder.

Last month marketing effectiveness research company System1 Group plc rejected a third offer of £43.1m from Brave Bison, which is its largest shareholder.

The first approach from Brave Bison, parent company of SocialChain, was an all-share affair, while the second contained a cash component. The third increased the cash component but not the value of the offer.

However it transpired last week that Lord Michael Ashcroft, who owns 23% of Brave Bison, had provided written support to System1 in its defence against the attempted hostile takeover – suggesting that he’s not in support of the move. Whether he would support the new improved fourth bid is unknown.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Big Technologies plc has ended settlement talks with its founder Sara Murray OBE.

The company is currently suing Murray for hundreds of millions of pounds after accusing her of forgery and deliberate falsification of documents to push through the company’s £577m IPO in 2021. 

Murray was dismissed as CEO in March 2025 over the accusations, and her assets have been frozen amid the subsequent and ongoing £320m High Court battle.

The company – trading as Buddi – is a provider of electronic monitoring solutions.

“The company’s preferred outcome for the SM proceedings remains for a settlement, whether mediated or otherwise. However, in the absence of meaningful settlement discussions, the company will continue to litigate the SM proceedings,” it stated this morning.

Murray continues to hold 25% of the voting rights in the firm and was recently successful in removing Camilla Macun as a non-executive director at its AGM. She and her supporters however failed to remove three other directors.

Following that, at the end of July, Ian Johnson retired from the board and as CEO. He had only joined the company 16 months before. Charles Lewinton was named acting CEO as it searches for a replacement.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Vanquis Banking Group plc has announced that Ian McLaughlin will step down as CEO for personal reasons by no later than the end of the year.

John Natalizia, currently deputy CEO and CEO of its subsidiary Snoop, will be appointed as interim CEO when Ian steps down, subject to regulatory approval.

In the meantime, the company’s board will initiate an internal and external executive search process to identify a successor to lead the group.

Natalizia joined Vanquis following the acquisition of FinTech Snoop in July 2023 and has been a member of the group executive committee since then. He was appointed deputy CEO in April 2026. 

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Nasdaq-listed company is eyeing a takeover of London-listed SThree.

SThree is a global STEM workforce consultancy with £1.3 billion revenues led by Timo Lehne.

This morning Circle8 confirmed the offer after media reports of a mooted approach caused a spike in SThree’s share price yesterday. Its market cap is £377 million at the time of writing.

Trainline plc is to commence a share repurchase programme of its ordinary shares of 1p each up to a maximum consideration of £100 million.

The programme will be executed over 12 months and is expected to commence following the completion of the current £150m share repurchase programme today.

It comes as the transport ticketing platform reports that total group revenue for the six months to the end of August dropped 1% to £233m compared with the prior year.

Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs, the London-headquartered AI audio research and product company, have announced a multi–year licensing agreement and wider strategic collaboration to launch a new AI-powered music platform for fans as well as to jointly develop AI audio products for artists and songwriters.

The agreement – ElevenLabs’ first with a major label – encompasses licensing and product development. It reflects the companies’ shared commitment to the principles that AI-enabled music innovation should be built responsibly, respect human artistry, and enable artists and songwriters to share in the value created.

The ElevenLabs-UMG relationship will begin with a new AI-powered music creation platform built on licensed music and artist participation.

Now in development, the platform will give fans new ways to co-create with music from participating artists and songwriters, including through remixes and mashups, new track interpretations, and personalized vocal experiences. The agreement also includes the development of additional products and fan experiences in the months and years to come.

HelmGuard, an agentic firm co-founded by a former Palantir executive, has raised a £5.4 million seed round of funding.

The London firm is building AI agents to assess and verify how organisations manage their security and compliance. These collect and assess risk signals directly from source systems, cutting assessment cycles from weeks to hours. 

The round was co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital and Entrepreneurs First. 

The funding will support continued expansion in the US market, including a New York and San Francisco presence alongside HelmGuard’s London headquarters.

John Daley, co-founder and CEO of HelmGuard, spent eight years as an executive at Palantir.

deepmirror, an AI startup building the foundation model for drug design, has been awarded a Phase 2 Sovereign AI grant as part of Innovate UK’s support for British businesses building world-leading AI technologies.

The grant will fund deepmirror’s data acquisition strategy in which it selects the experiments most likely to improve its molecular property models, expanding its proprietary dataset that helps chemists apply AI effectively to drug design. deepmirror has been awarded a 70% grant rate on its project, which is valued at roughly £1M.

Following completion of a successful Phase 1 project in November 2025, this second grant will enable deepmirror to further its data acquisition as it builds the most comprehensive data set of molecular properties for its foundational drug design model.

A new AI-powered SaaS platform developed at The University of Sheffield has secured £140,000 of early stage funding to accelerate the net zero ambitions of major infrastructure networks.

The DeepTech startup – RunPilot – is the brainchild of PhD researchers Joseph Hammond and Dr Thomas Cowley. 

Recognising that early infrastructure planning is still manual, fragmented and slow, they have developed the platform to accelerate the modelling and optimisation of multiple infrastructure routes – complete with environmental, technical and societal considerations, including consent risks.

Having collaborated with academics, policymakers, industry partners and now a technical brand specialist – The Engine Room – to strengthen the platform’s proposition, RunPilot secured the six-digit funding in an impactful pitch to the University board.

The British Business Bank has increased its commitment in Haatch’s pre-seed and seed funds by an additional £10 million. 

This brings its total commitment to £30m through the Regional Angels Programme, which is designed to increase the availability of early-stage capital for businesses across the UK. 

Every company backed through a Haatch fund receives matched capital from the British Business Bank alongside the fund’s own investment, allowing Haatch to write larger cheques at the earliest stages and to exceed the typical SEIS funding cap by adding £85,000 to each £250,000 investment. 

The commitment sits alongside a separate £32m platform managed by Haatch on behalf of the British Business Bank, which invests alongside a growing cohort of the UK’s most promising and diverse angel syndicates, including HERmesa, CircleRock Capital, The Games Angels, Sie Ventures and 2050 Capital. 

Taken together, total British Business Bank capital managed by Haatch now stands at £62m. 

To date, the British Business Bank and Haatch have co-invested in 208 companies with the number increasing every week. Haatch has backed more than 200 companies in total, with a combined portfolio valuation exceeding £1 billion, and has invested over 70% of its capital into companies headquartered outside London. 

Improbable-incubated Bolter, an AI-native messaging platform, has come out of stealth backed by a $10 million investment from the venture builder’s own capital.

Bolter allows non-technical operators to automate business processes by describing them in plain text – and where that work runs, is shared and compounds across a team.

Improbable has previously spent more than a decade building infrastructure for games and virtual worlds that placed thousands of concurrent users in a single space, being at one point among the largest consumers of Nvidia’s GPU streaming capacity. That expertise in running enormous fleets of machines now powers Bolter’s agents.

The product has launched in invite-only beta, with access requests open at bolter.chat.

Multiverse, an upskilling platform for AI and tech adoption, has appointed Kelly Griffith as senior vice president of coaching & delivery.

Griffith joins to lead Multiverse’s largest operational team, bringing a proven track record of scaling high-quality, global coaching networks to support the company’s rapidly growing learner base across the UK and Europe.

She joins from EZRA, the professional coaching platform, where she spent seven years as chief coaching officer. During her tenure, she built EZRA’s global coaching community from the ground up to over 4,500 professionals across more than 100 countries.

A qualified coach herself, Griffith brings deep operational experience and first-hand knowledge of professional development to the role.

Zopa Bank has appointed Bruce Fletcher and Dr Paula Walter as independent non-executive directors to its bank and group boards.

In addition, current board member Richard Goulding has been appointed senior independent director.

The move further strengthens Zopa’s governance and technological resilience as the Bank continues its rapid growth across lending, saving, everyday banking, investments and point-of-sale products — underpinned by Zopa’s proprietary technology and AI platform.

Fletcher joins Zopa’s risk committee. His career has been spent leading risk functions at some of the industry’s largest banks, both in the UK and the US. Most recently, Fletcher was chief risk officer at NatWest Group, where he led a 1,700-strong risk and compliance function across the Group’s retail, commercial, corporate and investment banking businesses. Earlier in his career, he held senior risk leadership roles at Citibank and at HSBC.

After nine years on Zopa’s board, Paul Cutter will step down at the end of the year, with Dr Walter succeeding him as the technology-focused independent non-executive director.

Most recently, she served as chief technology and information officer at specialist lender Aldermore Group from 2022 to 2024 where she led the technology and data strategy, cyber and infrastructure risk remediation. She previously held executive roles at Ruffer LLP, Newton Investment Management and Goldman Sachs.

Fast-growing Amazon agency Venture Forge has appointed Joel Turner as commercial director.

Turner joins Venture Forge with more than 20 years’ experience across eCommerce, media, technology and agency leadership. In his new role, he will be responsible for accelerating the agency’s growth, developing strategic partnerships and helping more ambitious brands benefit from Venture Forge’s expertise in navigating the Amazon marketplace.

His appointment comes hot on the heels of the signing of global sports nutrition brand Ultimate Sports Nutrition, which has appointed Venture Forge as a strategic partner to sharpen their commercial approach in the UK and expand into the right European markets.

The new client win provides further momentum as the agency continues to build its presence among established and growing brands.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

boohoo group plc has disposed of its Sheffield distribution centre for £90 million – a move which it says reduces its net debt to a ‘negligible level’.

The firm, which rebranded its trading face to Debenhams Group in 2025 – but failed to win shareholder approval to change the name of its listed entity – is transitioning from pure online retailer to a marketplace-led business model.

Debenhams Group – which owns the boohoo, PrettyLittleThing and Karen Millen brands – says the model is capital-lite, stock-lite, cost-lite and cash generative. Its ambition is for the marketplace to represent well over 50% of GMV.

Consistent with this strategy, it has sold the automation in its Sheffield distribution centre and reassigned the lease to Primark Stores Limited for a cash consideration of £90m.

Author: Chris Maguire

Could Manchester-based THG be about to sell some of its standalone brands in a bid to wipe out its debt?

The speculation has been fuelled by a paragraph in today’s upbeat interim results, which revealed group revenue was up 7.2 per cent in H1 2026.

In the outlook and guidance section of the report, THG said: “Following the successful sale of Claremont Ingredients in August 2025 for £103m, several of the group’s other non-strategic, standalone brands and assets have attracted bid interest.

“Should any sale occur at some point in the near future, it is expected that any proceeds would be higher than that for Claremont Ingredients, moving the group from net debt to net cash positive for FY 2027.”

THG doubled its money in the Claremont deal, which reduced its net debt from £330m to £230m in one stroke.

The eCommerce giant hasn’t revealed which of its brands have attracted ‘bid interest’ – or whether they’re even for sale – but it’s highly unlikely it would consider selling its crown jewel, Myprotein.