Author: Jonathan Symcox

A day after Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, one of his headline decisions was to fold the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology into an expanded Department for Business and Trade.

The new department, which will be known as the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology, will be led by former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.

In another sign that Burnham is keen to bring technology into mainstream decision-making, AI Minister Kanishka Narayan will be given a seat in the Cabinet, with his role straddling both the Cabinet Office and DBIST.

Narayan’s responsibilities within Sir Keir Starmer’s former government spanned AI opportunities, the AI Security Institute, semiconductors and online safety.

“AI is likely the most significant technology in human history. Its impact will dwarf other things,” Narayan wrote on X. “The best case for it is compelling beyond our dreams: a reindustrialised Britain, stronger national security, public services transformed for the better.”

However the scrapping of DSIT as a standalone entity means there is no longer a dedicated technology secretary after Liz Kendall was ousted by the new administration; and ‘digital’ has returned to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has been rebranded to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

Trade body techUK and the Startup Coalition called this “the wrong change at the wrong time”.

What did figures from technology and business make of the changes?

Author: Jonathan Symcox

UK robotics firm Humanoid has become a unicorn despite being founded just two years ago.

The London company raised $152 million (£114m) investment at a $1.35 billion valuation to become Europe’s first humanoid robotics unicorn.

It is the largest ever Series A investment into a humanoid-first robotics company in Europe.

The round brings the total amount raised to date to $270m and was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglaé Ventures. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Losses have widened at IntelliAM AI Plc as it begins to expand in the United States and eyes a listing on London’s junior AIM market.

The provider of AI-driven software solutions for the manufacturing and engineering sectors – currently listed on the challenger Aquis Stock Exchange – said revenues for the year ended 31st March 2026 climbed 64% to £5.26 million. Annual recurring revenue doubled to £1.65m.

However loss before tax was £1.95m (FY25: loss of £950,000) and adjusted EBITDA loss was £910,000 (FY25: loss of £160,000), which it said “reflected planned investment in product development, sales and customer support, together with the effect of longer sales cycles for larger customer opportunities”.

Cash reserves at the year end dropped to £100,000 from almost £2m a year earlier. IntelliAM said trade receivables were approximately £1.4m at the year end.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Manchester PropTech Street Group has been valued at more than £200 million by a strategic growth investment from listed private equity investor Hg.

London-based Hg is investing £7m, with some of its institutional clients also participating in the raise through its Hg Mercury Fund.

Founded and led by siblings and co-CEOs Tom and Heather Staff, Street has built an integrated operating system which spans its core CRM (Street.co.uk), its prospecting and lead-generation platform, Spectre, and a growing suite of AI-native products including Cortex, which allows customers to build and orchestrate their own AI agents.

Today, the business serves thousands of estate and letting agency branches across the UK.

The founder siblings remain majority controlling shareholders in Street Group and will continue to lead the business.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A $1.5 billion settlement against AI giant Anthropic has been approved by a US judge.

Authors and publishers are set for payouts after judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín certified the largest ever copyright lawsuit.

However the settlement recognised that Anthropic, maker of generative AI chatbot Claude, is free to train its models on works it has legally acquired as this was judged to be fair use.

The class action of Bartz et al vs. Anthropic, filed in 2024, pertained to Anthropic training its AI models on content it had not purchased. 

Writers accused Anthropic of illegally downloading and storing millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.

 

Data unveiled by NorthEdge has demonstrated its material contribution made in the regions outside of London and the South East.

The lower mid-market private equity firm’s latest Sustainability Report assessed the social and economic impact of its 18 portfolio companies – where NorthEdge is the lead investor – both on a regional and a national level.

Led by business economist Mark Gregory, the research details that NorthEdge’s portfolio companies have generated an estimated £612m of GVA (Gross Value Added) into the UK economy in 2025.

Supporting almost 9,800 UK jobs in 2025, much of the portfolio’s social and economic contribution was felt in regions outside of London and the South East, with 56% of GVA falling in the North, Midlands and Scotland.

The UK and Florida have joined forces to help space companies and researchers turn innovative ideas into commercial reality.

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the UK Government and Space Florida at the Farnborough International Airshow.

The agreement establishes a £300,000 joint fund, with a formal call for projects set to open in autumn 2026 and selections anticipated in 2027.

A Leeds-based digital security specialist which counts Leeds United among its client base has secured a £2.7 million investment from investor Maven Capital Partners.

Xentra provides IT solutions across cybersecurity, safeguarding and compliance to the education and SME markets.

Its subscription-based solutions help organisations to assess, implement and manage their security infrastructure around the clock.

The business supports over 90 customers including Leeds United, Leeds Bradford Airport, Vista Technology Support, JT Atkinson and education providers such as Shaw Education Trust.

The funding round includes investment from the Maven VCTs and NPIF II – Maven Equity Finance, which is managed by Maven Capital Partners as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II (NPIF II).

Innovate UK Business Connect is encouraging organisations from across the UK to explore opportunities to participate in a new £25 million funding competition designed to unlock greater consumer-led flexibility in the energy system.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Consumer Led Flexibility for the Clean Energy Superpower Mission competition will support ambitious projects that help homes, communities, businesses and industry play a more active role in the energy system.

While the competition will fund innovative AI, digital and end-to-end solutions, Innovate UK Business Connect is keen to engage organisations that may not traditionally work with UKRI but have valuable expertise, assets and access to communities that could strengthen project proposals.

Potential partners include charities, social housing providers, local authorities, public sector organisations, community groups and industrial businesses, all of whom can help innovators test, develop and deploy solutions in real-world environments.

Lightning Reach, a financial support portal based in London, has been acquired by European Technology Group.

ETG is described as a mission-aligned GovTech group and long-term investor.

Over 20 million people in the UK live in financially vulnerable circumstances, yet over £23 billion in financial support goes unclaimed each year, as the process is complex, slow and spread across multiple organisations. Lightning Reach was founded during Covid-19 to make accessing that support simple, through a single platform.

It has reached more than 300,000 people and facilitated over £25m in financial assistance, and is partnered with more than 100 utility providers, local authorities, charities, housing associations and banks across the UK.

With ETG’s backing, Lightning Reach says it will get long-term investment and public sector technology expertise to accelerate its goal of helping over 1 million people access financial support by 2028.

As part of the transition, COO Rhiannon Sheridan becomes CEO, with founder Ren Yi Hooi remaining involved as a director.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Half-year profits have plunged 75% at global STEM workforce consultancy SThree plc.

The London-headquartered firm says costs associated with its cutbacks are responsible for the drop. Revenue for the six months ended 31st May 2026 fell 8%.

SThree operates major hubs across Europe, the United States and Asia.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Frasers Group’s £1.7 billion bid to buy Hugo Boss has moved a step closer after it acquired more shares to pass the mandatory bid threshold of 30%.

Frasers has acquired a further 3.69% of the share capital and voting rights of the legendary German fashion designer. It now holds 30.28% – passing the threshold for required bids under the German takeover code.

Frasers said its cash offer of €38 per share remains open for shareholders to accept. The initial acceptance period for the offer will end on Monday 27th July.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

OCS Group has agreed a £3.1 billion cash swoop for fellow facilities management giant Mitie, a member of the FTSE 250 index.

Ipswich-headquartered OCS, backed by private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), said the deal – expected to complete in Q1 2027 – would create a combined business with £8.5bn revenue. 

The deal will require the approval of at least 75% of Mitie’s shareholder base.

The firms stated that an enlarged group would be better placed to serve and safeguard some of the UK’s most complex and critical built environments across government, defence, healthcare, national infrastructure and commercial markets.

It would also create more capacity for investment in technology and operations, they said.

 

Fhunded, Lancashire County Council’s (LCC) early-stage investment programme, has used its third anniversary to share details of the positive impact it has had on the county’s startup and scaleup economy.

It claims that its investor community has injected over £35m of funding into Lancashire’s early-stage business ecosystem since being launched in July 2023.

This represents 47% of all the total amount of verified equity investment raised by Lancashire businesses during this period.

Venture capitalists from many of the UK’s leading funds have now taken part in Fhunded’s ‘meet the investor’ events, including PXN, Par Equity, Seneca Partners, YFM, River Capital, Northern Gritstone, Mavern, DSW, Jenson Ventures, ACF, Mercia, Puma Ventures, EHE, Deepbridge and Solidbond.

Government-backed organisations such as the British Business Bank and Innovate UK have also partnered with Fhunded on Lancashire events, as have several major banks and other institutional investors.

Netcall plc, which seeks to automate customer engagement, expects to report FY26 results in line with market expectations, with another year of strong, profitable growth and increased cash generation.

For the financial year ended 30th June 2026, revenue is anticipated to increase by 20% to £57.7m (FY25: £48m), including organic growth of 12% alongside contributions from recent acquisitions.

Adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to increase by 23% to £12.1m (FY25: £9.8m), with the adjusted EBITDA margin rising to 21% (FY25: 20%).

Revolut has been granted an independent Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (ADI) licence by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), marking its official launch as a licensed bank in Australia and its first banking entity in the APAC region.

The London-headquartered firm, which has more than 75 million customers worldwide – including a million retail customers and thousands of businesses in Australia – is the first global FinTech to secure a full unrestricted ADI licence.

The regulatory milestone is backed by Revolut’s commitment to invest nearly AUD$400 million into the local market over the next five years.

The expansion adds Australia to Revolut’s established fully licensed banking footprint across the UK, EEA and Mexico.

Voxshell, a Cranfield University spinout, has closed a £800,000 seed funding round from DSW Ventures, with support from Innovate UK, to accelerate ChopMesh, its proprietary meshing platform for engineering simulation.

Voxshell was created to support the advanced manufacturing sector. While additive manufacturing and next-generation design tools have unlocked product geometries that were impossible to build a decade ago, the simulation infrastructure needed to validate and refine these designs hasn’t kept pace.

By incorporating AI-accelerated processing, ChopMesh automates workflows in which legacy tools require human intervention, generating geometrically faithful meshes substantially faster.

Having spun out of Cranfield University in April 2024, Voxshell already has paying customers and pilots underway with a number of tier-one aerospace original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Alongside the investment, Clive Scrivener joins Voxshell as non-executive chair. As the former CEO of Prodrive, Scrivener is currently chair at Oxa, the Oxford autonomous vehicle spinout. He has also held multiple other chair and non-executive roles in scaling technology businesses, including CloudNC.

Propel Healthtech West Yorkshire is inviting innovators with ambitious healthtech solutions to apply for the final accelerator cohort of 2026.

Delivered by Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber, in partnership with West Yorkshire Combined Authority, successful applicants will benefit from a comprehensive six-month programme designed to accelerate commercial growth and NHS adoption, including expert business development support, regulatory guidance, one-to-one mentoring, masterclasses and direct access to NHS organisations, investors and industry partners.

The programme launched in November 2025 following £4.5 million through the West Yorkshire Mayor’s Investment Zone, part of a wider £160m Investment Zone, designed to accelerate innovation, attract investment and strengthen the region’s health and life sciences sector.

Over the next four years, the programme will support hundreds of innovators, helping businesses grow within West Yorkshire while developing technologies that improve patient care, tackle healthcare challenges and create high-value jobs across the region.

Applications close on Friday 25th September at 4pm.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

FTSE 100 listed UK property group Segro has rejected a third takeover offer from a US firm ahead of a deadline for submitting a concrete bid.

Segro, which slammed Prologis over its initial £12.6 billion all-share approach last month, turned down a second offer earlier this month then a third approach valued at £13.5bn – and sweetened with a £2.7bn cash element.

Segro owns a portfolio of warehouses and data centres – mainly in the South East of England – and has benefited from the growth of online shopping.

Craneware, a provider of healthcare financial performance solutions, has been hit by a cyber security incident.

The AIM-listed firm said it is responding to a cyber security incident involving unauthorised access to a subset of its data environment.

The company’s incident response plan has been activated, it said, including the appointment by its board of external cyber security and forensic specialists.