For Paul Hallett, the road to reshaping global pet care began right in the lecture theatres of Leeds University. 

Spending over two decades building high-growth ventures, including his first agency, Perfect Marketing, paved the way for close collaborations with prominent local tech minds like Sleepcogni’s Rich Mills and Ash Patel. 

These formative years eventually culminated in 2018, when Hallett joined forces with experienced veterinarian Robert Dawson and veterinary dermatologist Sarah Warren to launch Vet-AI, a research-driven startup on a mission to make animal healthcare affordable and accessible for everyone.

Today, the business anchors a global team of over 120 professionals, has raised more than £20 million in strategic capital from major industry investors like Hill’s Pet Nutrition, and has expanded its footprint into the competitive US market. 

 

The British Business Bank has agreed to commit up to £46 million to Zinc Capital Management’s second institutional fund.

The Science-for-Impact Fund is aiming to accelerate the creation and growth of innovative UK DeepTech startups tackling critical health and environmental challenges. It is targeting a £70m fund size and building of a portfolio of 80 new DeepTech companies. 

The British Business Bank’s commitment, made through the Enterprise Capital Funds programme, follows its previous commitment to Zinc II in 2022 and will enable Zinc to expand its support for founders.

 

Gotobeat, a music promoter driven by technology, is to expand into the festival market next year after making a heavyweight appointment.

The London firm, founded by serial entrepreneur Max Busin to fill grassroots venues with promising artists, has appointed Mike Lightford, former director of music at Boardmasters and NASS Festivals, as head of festivals.

Gotobeat, which recently expanded into arena offerings, has also confirmed details of its first festival programme, taking place at Beckenham Place Park in July 2027. The six-show series will span two weekends, with more than 10 artists performing each day across two stages and capacity for 12,000 attendees per day.

ALT has launched a Manchester office as the creative media agency expands beyond its Glasgow base. 

The news follows the installation of a new leadership team in May and reflects the strong growth of ALT since it was founded by husband-wife duo David and Laura Haggerty in 2019 with the goal of putting creativity at the heart of media planning. 

The agency now boasts 25 full-time employees serving a roster of global clients, including UEFA and Whyte & Mackay.

Celerity, a Manchester-based managed IT services provider backed by investor BGF, has acquired Insight 2 Value (I2V).

Based in Warwick, I2V is a specialist in intelligent automation and enterprise content management, with expertise in IBM FileNet and Cloud Pak for business automation.

The acquisition will strengthen Celerity’s capacity to provide solutions that improve customer onboarding, complaints handling, case management and regulatory compliance, connecting content seamlessly to improve service delivery and accelerate customer-facing operations.

Renalytix plc, a precision medicine diagnostics company focussed on kidney disease, has raised £10.1 million in a share placing.

It has also issued conversion shares to Heights Capital Management Inc at the issue price of 6p, increasing the transaction value to £13.6m.

Renalytix’s official HQ is in London, with operational teams based in the US.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Edinburgh firm pureLiFi has crashed into administration with all of its 42 staff made redundant.

The company was behind the development of a light-based alternative to WiFi. It had raised £35 million in funding.

The firm was founded in 2012 by Prof. Harald Haas and Dr Mostafa Afgani as a spin-out of the University of Edinburgh and used the light spectrum to send data rather than radio frequencies. 

By making small adjustments in the intensity of light, it claimed to deliver an internet connection with a bandwidth far beyond the capabilities of conventional wireless communications. 

With data traffic increasing exponentially every year and causing a ‘spectrum crunch’ headache, the potential for easing the burden on existing technologies is massive, then-CEO Alistair Banham told BusinessCloud in 2020. He retired last year.

fulfilment.com, a data-driven platform connecting eCommerce brands with third-party logistics fulfilment providers, has appointed James Moore as a non-executive director.

The appointment follows the company’s £4m late seed investment round in February 2026, led by Blackfinch Ventures with participation from Haatch Ventures.

Moore brings nearly two decades of experience building and scaling fast-growth technology marketplaces. His career spans senior roles at Betfair, EA Games’ Origin, eBay, and Amazon, before joining Trainline as General Manager of the UK consumer business. 

He formed part of the executive team that took Trainline to IPO in June 2019 at a valuation of £2.1 billion.

Following Trainline, Moore worked alongside the founding team at YourParkingSpace, supporting its scale-up through to a successful £125m exit. 

He is currently CEO of Shift, the large item delivery marketplace and lockers business, and operates as a non-executive director and angel investor across a number of technology businesses.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Battery startup Nexeon has secured backing from the National Wealth Fund as part of a £100 million funding round.

The National Wealth Fund has committed £52.6m, with other new investors in the round including the Korea Development Bank and Honda Xcelerator Ventures.

Nexeon, headquartered in Abingdon near Oxford, is developing silicon anode materials which enable production of higher energy density lithium-ion batteries, helping to reduce charging times and extend the range of electric vehicles.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Tim Cook has stepped down as the CEO of Apple after 15 years in which he grew the iPhone maker into a $4.5 trillion company.

After a transition period this summer, he has now been succeeded by John Ternus and moved into the role of executive chair.

Ternus inherits a company with record $100 billion profits. So why has Cook and Apple’s board of directors turned to the hardware engineering executive?

Author: Chris Maguire

The UK has created 14 new unicorns in 2026 – just one fewer than in the whole of 2023-2025 combined.

According to research by Tracxn Technologies, a leading data intelligence platform, the UK has created 97 unicorns in total.

The list is made up of companies that achieved a $1bn equity valuation at any point prior to acquisition or IPO.

According to Tracxn, July alone saw four new unicorns created – Moneybox, Humanoid, CuspAI and Kraken Technology Group.

Another striking trend from the research is the speed at which companies are achieving unicorn status.

UK robotics firm Humanoid and CuspAI, a platform developing new materials to tackle global sustainability and clean energy challenges, were both founded in 2024 but became unicorns in 2026.

Ineffable Intelligence, led by David Silver, a professor at University College London, was founded in 2025 and became a unicorn after raising a record $1.1bn in its Seed round in April.

By comparison, music app Shazam was founded in 2000 but didn’t become a unicorn until 2015, while global travel search and comparison platform Skyscanner took 13 years to reach a $1bn valuation in 2016.

Aquis Stock Exchange, the UK’s challenger market for listed companies, has announced the inaugural cohort of the Aquis IPO Academy, the UK’s only public markets readiness programme run by an exchange.

The Academy, in partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs, is a long-term investment in the UK’s growth economy at a pivotal moment for scaling businesses, aiming to act as an engine for IPO activity while addressing the perception gap around accessing public markets. 

It draws on the expertise of Barclays Eagle Labs and SIX, which acquired Aquis in 2025, combining domestic scale-up expertise with European IPO Academy experience.

The first cohort is made up of over 25 ambitious UK growth companies, half of which are founded by women.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Dutch FinTech Mollie has completed its €1.1 billion acquisition of UK rival GoCardless.

When originally announcing the deal in December 2025, the firms said that more than 90% of the consideration will be paid in shares, with the remainder in cash.

GoCardless was founded by CEO Hiroki Takeuchi, Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson in 2011. A few years later Takeuchi, its chief executive, was paralysed from the chest down following a cycle crash.

In the year ending June 2025, its last published accounts, it narrowed losses before tax to £24.2m, and recently posted its first profitable quarter. This followed a series of cutbacks. Meanwhile Mollie achieved EBITDA profitability in 2024 and reported €147 million in net revenue in 2025.

The deal creates Europe’s leading payments and financial services partner, with more than 350,000 business customers across 30+ markets. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Oxford BioMedica fell 15% today despite a recent positive half-year trading update.

In early August, the MedTech said H1 2026 revenues had grown 9% to approximately £80 million.

That followed the rejection of several takeover offers from Swedish private equity firm EQT for the cell and gene therapy developer.

However Oxford Biomedica, founded in 1995 and listed in London for 30 years, seems open to a take-private deal from other PE houses which may be more aligned with its business, CEO Frank Mathias said recently.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Cambridge-based technology entrepreneur has donated £500,000 to far-right anti-immigration party Restore Britain.

Simon Galbraith, who describes himself as a tentative philanthropist, sits on the board of several companies.

After co-founding Red Gate Software in 1999, he served as its CEO for more than two decades. He is now chairman of the database management company, which sold a majority stake to US private equity firm Bregal Sagemount earlier this year.

He has chosen to back the new political party of Rupert Lowe, former chairman of Southampton FC, who registered Restore Britain earlier this year after a public spat with Nigel Farage saw him  leave Reform.

Lowe has the backing of Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk, who shares all the former’s posts on his social media platform X.

Made Smarter Yorkshire has offered a new programme to provide funding and education for cybersecurity to UK manufacturers as part of a larger £400,000 grant.

Partnering with Sheffield Hallam University, the programme aims to help businesses gain basic accreditations, and train ‘Cyber Security Champions’ within manufacturers, employees who are tasked with reviewing an organisation’s weaknesses and building a cyber-oriented culture more broadly.

The programme comes at a time of increasing risk to the UK manufacturing industry in particular which, based on industry surveys, saw nearly a third of firms targeted in attacks last year.

UK-based CloudClevr has today announced the acquisition of Flow Automated Intelligence (Flow AI) from SCC, marking the next step in its M&A strategy and significantly expanding its capabilities across AI, automation and data.

Flow AI is an established digital transformation managed services business with more than 20 years’ experience across document services, business process automation and information management.

The acquisition brings approximately £8m of additional revenue and around 90 colleagues into the wider CloudClevr business.

Flow AI will also form the foundation of CloudClevr’s new digital transformation practice, which will be built around two core pillars: AI & Automation Services and Data Services.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

NorthEdge has completed its ninth technology exit with the sale of Distology to Foresight Group.

The lower-mid-market investor first backed cybersecurity vendor Distology, led by Founder 250 star Hayley Roberts, in 2021.

It marked the Stockport firm’s first institutional capital raise.

Roberts recently appeared on our podcast The Naked Founder and was also a Northern Leader in 2025.

Five Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) between the University of Salford and businesses across the region have received a ‘Very Good’ grading from Innovate UK, recognising collaborations that have helped organisations innovate, develop new capabilities and drive business growth.

KTPs are funded in part by Innovate UK and bring together a business, a university and a dedicated KTP Associate to solve strategic business challenges through research and innovation.

The University of Salford has been involved in the programme since its launch in 1975, when it was one of the original pilot universities, and has spent more than 50 years helping organisations translate research into real-world impact.

The projcts are:

Creating healthier workplaces through sound – working with acoustic consultancy KP Acoustics, researchers developed an intelligent soundscape system that creates personalised, adaptive sound environments to make workplaces healthier, more comfortable and less distracting. The partnership combined expertise in acoustics and human perception to turn research into a prototype with commercial potential.

Developing quieter propulsion technologies – led by Professor Torija Martinez of the Salford Acoustics Innovation Institute, the project partnered with Greenjets to develop innovative tools that help engineers design quieter electric propulsion systems for drones and future aircraft. By making it possible to predict and mitigate noise from the earliest stages of the design process, the project has strengthened the University’s expertise in this rapidly growing field while enabling Greenjets to incorporate noise considerations throughout the propulsion system development cycle. This allows the company to identify optimal, cost-effective designs at an early stage, reducing the need for expensive redesigns and accelerating the development of quieter, more sustainable aviation technologies.

Driving digital transformation in construction –  the University partnered with engineering supplier Valves Instruments Plus (VIP) Ltd, to help the business adopt Building Information Modelling (BIM), enabling its products to be specified much earlier in construction projects.

Improving building performance through thermal innovation – partnering with Farrat, the project translated pioneering work on thermal bridges into practical tools that help architects and engineers reduce heat loss in buildings. The project strengthened the University’s expertise in sustainable construction while laying the foundations for continued collaboration in retrofit and low-carbon building design.

Using AI to improve legal services – the project worked with Irwin Mitchell to embed artificial intelligence and data science within one of the UK’s leading law firms. By developing new machine learning tools and building in-house expertise, the partnership is helping the firm make better use of data to improve client services, support business decisions and drive future growth.

Pulsant, a UK data centre and digital infrastructure platform, has unveiled a £1m investment in its Birmingham data centre to support future demand for AI in the city.

Infrastructure upgrades to the 2,405m2 facility – acquired from Europe’s largest independent IT solutions and services provider Specialist Computer Centres PLC (SCC) last year – will support the surge in advanced computing.

The site, five miles southeast of the city centre, has been fully integrated into Pulsant’s UK-wide Edge infrastructure platform, which interconnects 14 regional data centres from Edinburgh to Fareham on the South Coast.

It provides local businesses with secure, high-speed infrastructure, alongside access to more than 1,600 technology providers, including international carriers.

The investment also includes upgraded security and a full refurbishment to improve the experience of people working in the data centre – both from Pulsant, and regional businesses who keep their own infrastructure on site.