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.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Private equity giant Accel-KKR has agreed a £207 million takeover of historic firm Eleco plc.

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.

CloudNC, behind AI software for precision machining, has raised £15 million in new investment capital.

Computer Numerical Control (CNC) is an automated manufacturing process where a computer program controls factory tools and machinery.

CloudNC’s lead product, CAM Assist, uses AI to greatly reduce the time required to create CNC machining strategies and toolpaths, allowing teams to move from design to production faster and enabling skilled operators to increase their output.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

McLaren has bucked UK automotive industry trends after announcing a £450 million investment into its technology centre in Woking.

The supercar maker is reportedly creating 1,000 jobs here as it looks to overhaul its product line-up under new chief creative officer David Woodhouse, who has experience at Nissan and Ford. It currently employs 2,500 people.

That could include more everyday-style models such as SUVs, rather than its current line-up of supercars such as the F1 and GT models.

The 1,000 new jobs at McLaren, as first reported by the Financial Times, will include indirect and agency workers.

The news comes a day after Jaguar Land Rover announced that it would be cutting 4,000 jobs globally over the next two years. 

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The Government ‘wants answers’ after the chaos which saw around 2,000 flights cancelled in the UK yesterday and today.

Air traffic control boss Martin Rolfe has been told by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander that he has a week to deliver a full investigation after a technical failure on Tuesday at a facility run by NATS, the British air traffic control system.

Ryanair chief operations officer Neal McMahon and Wizz Air UK MD Yvonne Moynihan called for the removal of Rolfe, with McMahon demanding that the Government intervene to fix what he called the UK’s “chronic” air traffic control issues.

Rolfe apologised to those affected by the “IT failure”. A spokesman for Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that Alexander had met Rolfe this morning.

incentifi, a self-funding behavioural rewards platform that turns wellness into travel and real financial value, has welcomed a new investor.

Marcus Watson, co-founder and chairman of Adoreum Partners, is an experienced corporate adviser, entrepreneur and investor with an active investment portfolio spanning more than 30 media, technology, health and wellness companies.

His financial backing comes as incentifi opens its UK beta programme, giving selected brands early access to the platform over a limited 3-4 week window to pilot rewards modes and experience first hand how everyday wellbeing converts into financial and travel benefits.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Pathos Communications plc have risen 7% today to around 28 pence after it posted strong half-year results.

The AI public relations firm was founded in 2019 by stand-up comedian Omar Hamdi (pictured), who combined a background in computing, journalism and television presenting to democratise access to established news publications utilising a ‘pay-on-results’ model.

Having never raised institutional funding, it underwent a £20 million public listing in December 2025, raising more than £5m as it joined the London Stock Exchange’s junior AIM market. However shares are 14% down on their IPO price.