Made Smarter has bolstered its North West team with four new specialists as SME manufacturers accelerate investment in technology and skills.

Mike Richards-Brown and Tabs Khojani will help firms find practical ways to digitalise their operations, while Jane Duffy and Mike Connolly will help businesses prepare their people and develop the leadership needed to deliver change.

Together they bring decades of experience from some of the region’s leading manufacturing, technology and business support organisations.

Richards-Brown joins following roles at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre North West (AMRC NW) and the North of England Robotics Innovation Centre (NERIC).

Khojani brings 20 years of experience in Greater Manchester’s innovation and business support sector and also joins from NERIC at the University of Salford.

Duffy previously supported businesses through the Business Growth Hub across Greater Manchester, while Connolly, a Mechanical Engineer, has spent more than three decades with global manufacturer Hubbell, working across engineering, quality, operations and HR.

Their recruitment to the Government-backed adoption programme comes as manufacturers face growing pressure to become more productive, overcome skills challenges and keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies.

New registrations rose 49% last year, with a further 128 manufacturers coming forward in the first five months of 2026/27.

The new recruits will work alongside Made Smarter’s existing team to help companies develop a digital roadmap and decide where and how to invest, including accessing match-funded grants of up to £20,000.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Technology entrepreneur Rudi Kesic has launched a new venture, ClearPath AI, in Birmingham.

Described as an AI-native operating system for legal and professional services, the startup claims to have won £1 million pre-seed backing from entrepreneurs and senior industry figures.

Kesic chose Birmingham as the commercial home for the company and plans to create more than 20 new roles in the UK, while its technology operation is based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The founder grew up in Coventry and has spent much of his professional life working in Birmingham and across the region.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Transport technology provider Tracsis has completed its £48 million acquisition of Mistral Data, a wholly owned subsidiary of FirstGroup plc.

Listed Leeds company Tracsis said the deal completed yesterday following clearance from the Competition and Markets Authority. 

Days after the deal was initially announced last month, Tracsis sold its events transport planning and management business to Connection Capital for £7.25m cash.

This morning Tracsis also reported that group revenue for its latest financial year is expected to be £85.5m (2025: £81.9m), with adjusted EBITDA of £13.5m (2025: £12.6m).

In both cases, the figures include the full-year contribution from the events business it sold.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A new interim CFO has been appointed at SkinBioTherapeutics plc following the departure of the figure who triggered a probe into the actions of ex-CEO Stuart Ashman.

The Newcastle firm, developing gut-based products which promote skin health, was thrown into crisis earlier this year.

Emily Bertram, who joined as CFO in 2025, escalated concerns that results had been misrepresented, leading to the departure of Ashman, who had joined the company as CEO in 2024. Its share price also dropped from around 20 pence to 5p.

Bertram decided to leave the company at the end of June, with interim CEO Rachel Parsonage hailing her “diligence and professional integrity” in identifying and escalating issues to the board.

Now Anita Slater has been appointed interim CFO – a non-board role – for an initial six-month term, starting immediately.

Blackbird plc has announced that Steve White, the company’s chief operating and financial officer, will step down from his role on 31st August 2026 in order to pursue new opportunities.

The firm has developed a browser-based collaborative video editor, elevate.io.

Chris McDonald MP has been confirmed as the new Minister with responsibility for intellectual property.

This follows his appointment as Minister of State (Minister for Science, Innovation and Investment) jointly in the Department for Health and Social Care and the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade last month.

Oshen, a British robotics company building a persistent sensing layer for the world’s oceans, is tripling its manufacturing rate to meet demand from navies, weather agencies and ocean scientists. Its swarms of one-metre wind-and solar powered vessels deliver real-time ocean intelligence for security, climate and infrastructure.

Navies procure a handful of billion-dollar ships in single digits over decades and spend much of their time tracking submarine activity across the North Atlantic. Oshen’s bet is that the job needs the opposite – thousands of cheap, expendable, mass-produced robots, built like compute hardware, at sea.

Oshen’s customers and partners now include the US Navy’s Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, the Royal Navy, NOAA, the Met Office, Météo-France and VOTO, the Swedish ocean-monitoring body. Its C-star production has scaled to match. The company initially took three years to build its first 15 C-Stars, and now builds 15 every six weeks with a standardising system that allows a new technician to assemble parts in less than half an hour so it can be replicated at multiple sites.

Finova, the UK’s largest provider of cloud-based mortgage, savings and lending software, has appointed Tom Tredwell as director of data.

Tredwell joins from Shawbrook Bank, bringing more than 20 years’ experience across the mortgage industry, specialising in data, reporting and analytics.

His career spans entrepreneurial startups and established financial institutions, including serving as a founding shareholder of The Mortgage Lender before its acquisition by Shawbrook.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Callosum, an AI infrastructure company founded by Cambridge scientists Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, has raised $100 million (£73m) in seed financing.

One of the largest seed rounds ever raised in Europe and aims to rewrite how AI is computed.

Callosum says it has built a software layer that co-optimises AI models and chips, orchestrating each workload across the hardware best suited to run it – removing reliance on any single frontier model or chip.

The founders met while earning their PhDs at Cambridge, where their research examined how the brain achieves intelligence not by replicating one type of neuron billions of times but by combining specialised circuits.

They argue AI systems will follow the same pattern: many models, interacting collectively, on diverse computing substrates.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A listed HealthTech is to appoint administrators after failing to secure new funding earlier this year.

Trellus Health plc – whose shares were suspended from trading in May – had taken cost-saving measures to extend its cash runway.

It had previously reduced its monthly cash burn to an average of $300k and secured an emergency loan from one of its co-founders.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

An assistant head is building a coaching platform which helps teachers to gain insight into their lessons without feeling they are being surveilled.

Adam Sturdee is a history teacher by training and has spent his career in secondary education. He now serves as an assistant headteacher at a Catholic secondary school in Wiltshire, where he leads teaching, learning and coaching across the school. 

Last year he founded STAR21 with engineer Enzo Zadrima and operations lead Tim Chapman. Sturdee guides the startup on education strategy, product direction and practitioner research. 

He says their AI-powered Starlight platform – which records lesson audio – automates feedback that is specific and actionable without surveilling staff.

Tandem has announced a series of senior leadership changes.

The digital challenger bank says the moves are part of a new investor-backed strategy focused on sustainable finance – helping customers live more sustainably and build everyday financial resilience. 

Simon Bowen joins Tandem as chief risk officer, bringing over 25 years of risk and finance transformation experience across the UK banking sector, most recently as CRO at Hodge Bank as well as senior roles at Lloyds Banking Group and Principality Building Society. 

Tandem has also strengthened its wider risk leadership with the appointment of Natalie Trist as director of credit risk strategy, bringing over 25 years’ credit leadership experience across HSBC, Close Brothers, Secure Trust Bank and Vanquis Banking Group.

Kevin Purcell joins as chief people officer, succeeding Catherine Diamond. Formerly CPO at Secure Trust Bank, he also served as CPO at Universities Superannuation Scheme and has held senior HR leadership roles at Barclays Investment Bank and UBS Investment Bank. 

Tandem has also confirmed further internal changes. 

Shield Therapeutics plc has reported a large increase in revenues and narrowing losses in its latest half-year results.

The commercial-stage pharmaceutical company specialises in iron deficiency and says it remains on track for operating profitability in 2026.

For the six months ended 30th June 2026, group revenues were $30.4 million, increasing 42% over H1 2025.

Its losses significantly narrowed from $9.5m to $2.3m, driven primarily by higher group revenues alongside continuance of streamlining business expenditures.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Singular Photonics, a developer of next-generation image sensors, has closed a £1.6 million funding round.

The Edinburgh-based fabless semiconductor startup has also announced that Dipesh Patel, the former CTO of global semiconductor giant Arm, has joined the company’s board of directors.

During his 25 years at Arm, Dr Patel held a number of general and technical management positions culminating in his role as CTO where he was responsible for the research and digital IT functions. 

Based in the US, Dr Patel is the chairman of Leeds-based Optalysys, a company looking to harness light to transfer data securely and at high speeds.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Former leaders at GCHQ & Darktrace have raised £16 million to expand Prevalent AI in the United States.

The bootstrapped cybersecurity company has built a data fabric and knowledge graph over the last nine years which is used by several leading global enterprises.

The funding comes from Los Angeles-based Integrity Growth Partners and marks Prevalent AI’s first primary capital raise.

Flip, an AI-native employee experience platform for frontline workers, has raised £19 million.

AI is reshaping careers for people who sit at a desk but, for the estimated 80% of the world’s workforce who don’t, it barely exists – and the risk isn’t just missing out on a new tool. 

Workers across production, retail, logistics, care and hospitality are being left behind colleagues who are building AI skills. Frontline roles risk staying exactly as they are, which could have a detrimental impact on their pay, progression and job security in sectors where turnover is already high.

The new round is backed by existing investors Notion Capital and HV Capital, who are expanding their stake in the software company. L-Bank, the development bank of the state of Baden-Württemberg, is also joining as a new investor along with a consortium of business angels and institutional investors filling out the rest. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Medly AI has raised almost £6 million seed funding ‘to give every kid an AI tutor’.

Described as the world’s first AI tutor for exam prep, the platform launched in February 2025 and claims to have scaled its user base to more than 400,000 in the UK alone. 

It has also joined major British success stories ElevenLabs and Pearson in being awarded the Department for Education’s competitive AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme grant in July this year, which is focused on improving the academic attainment of disadvantaged pupils across England.

The round was led by Felix Capital and backed by existing investors Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures. 

The UK government has announced the introduction of AI to be used on the police’s non-emergency line to cut waiting times and reduce pressure on call handlers to ensure the public reach the right department quicker.

The initiative is backed by £1.4 million of government investment to use the new AI call-routing system to automatically identify why someone is calling 101 and redirect issues to the correct agency before the caller enters a queue.

The 101 line receives 20 million calls a year but around 20 per cent are misdirected and should have gone to other organisations including local councils and NHS 111. The service also faces thousands of prank calls from complaints about slow pub service to requests for a lift which wastes vital police time.

The new system, developed by the Home Office will help forces respond more quickly to crime reports to safeguard concerns and victim who need urgent support. It is estimated to save pole up to £8.5 million annually and free resources for frontline priorities.

John Lucey, VP EMEA at Cellebrite, said: “AI powered systems are accelerating police and law enforcement processes and empowering them to keep pace with crime in this digital landscape, acting as an assistant while human expertise remains at the forefront.

“AI can quickly generate contextual summaries from callers and direct calls to the right handler to act more consistently and crack down on even the most difficult crimes. The key is to always maintain a human-in-the-loop approach with clear audit trails and oversight that gives investigators control of what evidence is brought forward.”

Mvmnt, a TV-first fitness platform, today announces a comprehensive brand evolution alongside the launch of RepCon: a new feature that brings live coach-led fitness competition to TV screens with hardware-free rep-tracking.

RepCon brings live fitness competition into the home environment, without the hardware dependency that has defined the category to date. Built on form-tracking technology developed in-house by Mvmnt, RepCon uses a standard smartphone camera to count reps in real time as users follow the coach-led workout on their TV screen; removing the need for wearables, sensors, or any additional hardware.

As a fully bodyweight-based format, RepCon requires no equipment investment, making it accessible across fitness levels.

Live scores feed into an on-screen leaderboard on users’ TV, letting members compete for top spots, beat personal bests, and unlock a competitive edge; all while connecting with the wider Mvmnt community. Available via live weekly broadcasts and on-demand sessions, RepCon combines high-energy coaching with real-time performance data designed to keep members accountable, engaged, and coming back for more.

UK agtech startup EcoNomad Solutions has received £230,000 in funding from the British Design Fund to help small livestock farms cut methane emissions, reduce rising energy and fertiliser costs, and turn organic waste into renewable energy.

The investment forms part of a wider £400,000 funding round alongside an Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant and additional support from existing investor Beeches Group.

Small and mid‑sized livestock farms across the UK and Europe face a triple challenge: rising energy and fertiliser costs, tightening regulations around slurry and waste management, and pressure to reduce methane emissions, with agriculture being one of the largest sources of man‑made methane globally. Yet most existing anaerobic digestion systems are built for large farms, making them too expensive, too complex, or simply too big for smaller operators.

EcoNomad’s flagship product, the BioNomad, is designed specifically to close this gap. The patented system captures methane that would otherwise be emitted, converts organic waste into biogas for heating, cooking or electricity, and produces high‑quality biofertiliser that reduces reliance on chemical inputs.