Author: Jonathan Symcox

Pioneer Point Partners , a private equity firm focused on sustainable infrastructure, has taken a majority stake in Rendesco.

The transaction represents the fifth investment by Pioneer’s second institutional fund, Pioneer Infrastructure Partners II, which reached final close in April 2025.

Pioneer has committed up to £100 million to Rendesco, with the Fund’s initial investment being used to acquire a majority stake in the business and support the delivery of its existing and future pipeline.

A partnership that aims to put the UK at the forefront of self-driving vehicle technology has been signed by the Government with Wayve.

Wayve, founded in Cambridge and now based in London, recently revealed fresh funding of potentially more than $1.5 billion, which valued the company at $9bn.

It has been backed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Arm, Qualcomm Ventures, Eclipse, Balderton, SoftBank, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis.

Now it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government to deepen collaboration on next‑generation self‑driving technologies and back the scaleup.

 

AskEd has raised £100,000 pre-seed funding at a £2m valuation from angel investors and launched its voice AI platform for university and college student recruitment.

The company was founded by Stefan Parker, who spent 15 years in higher education student recruitment, and John Crick, who has over two decades of international student recruitment experience.

Parker developed the initial concept following his redundancy last October and tested an early prototype with students at Middlesex University before approaching Crick.

AskEd’s platform handles student enquiries by voice in real time, in over 70 languages, around the clock. It draws on each institution’s own verified content to answer questions accurately, qualifies leads and integrates with existing CRM systems. The basic deployment requires one line of code, the EdTech firm says.

Ofgem and Innovate UK have today announced the launch of a £500 million energy fund.

Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund opens for applications on 26th May and aims to attract projects that focus on upgrading the energy network – bringing them to trial or launch. Delivered in partnership with Innovate UK, the SIF is funded by Ofgem.

Five innovation challenges, recommended by the Energy Networks Innovation Taskforce and endorsed by Ofgem, set out the core priorities for the coming five-year RIIO-3 price control period.

The Payments Association, a trade body representing over 250 member organisations in the financial services sector, has appointed Emma Banymandhub as CEO.

Banymandhub previously served as the association’s COO during a time which saw it triple its headcount.

This comes as the trade body sets its sights on international expansion, having established itself as a UK-centric payments powerhouse during its 18-year history.

A gaming tech startup has raised £5.1 million to build user acquisition AI agents for mobile game studios and the consumer market.

The Series A round into London-based Kohort was led by The Raine Group, which invested seed capital in 2025 and has a commercial relationship with the firm.

Kohort has built a predictive analytics platform which helps mobile game studios, operators, finance teams and investors optimise user acquisition spend and perform M&A due diligence.

itim Group plc, behind tech enabling store-based retailers to optimise their businesses, swung into the red in 2025 as revenues dipped.

For the year ended 31st December 2025, group revenue decreased by 2% to £17.5m. However recurring revenue now represents 77% of this after this increased 9% to £14.2m.

Group adjusted EBITDA was £1.7m (FY24: £2.5m), while loss before tax was £500,000 compared to a profit of £200,000 in FY24.

The 51% Club, a definitive community for ambitious female founders and leaders, is marking its second birthday with the announcement of its most significant milestone to date – the launch of a dedicated co-working space for female founders and leaders in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.

Opening on 1st June 2026, The 51% Club at The Wilmot will be housed within The Wilmot, one of Birmingham’s most beautifully restored heritage buildings. The space will offer dedicated desks and flexible passes exclusively for women building and scaling their businesses, and its announcement comes at a time when only 2-4% of women-led businesses in the UK reach £1 million in revenue.

The launch marks a defining moment for The 51% Club, which has grown from a series of Birmingham events to a national movement with five city hubs located in Birmingham, Leamington Spa, Leicester, London and Worcester.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Isomorphic Labs, an AI-first drug design and development company founded by DeepMind founder Sir Demis Hassabis, has raised £1.6 billion in Series B funding.

The latest round of investment will accelerate the UK company’s evolution from pioneering novel AI models to applying them at scale.

The financing round is led by Thrive Capital, and includes participation from existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, significantly expanding Isomorphic Labs’ global capital base.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A failed neobank based in Manchester has re-emerged as a profitable FinTech infrastructure provider.

In 2024 Frost, which combined digital banking with energy-switching tools, closed all retail customer accounts after five years of operation.

Despite attracting more than 18,000 users and processing tens of millions of pounds in transaction volume, changes in the market forced the business to rethink its future.

At the time, founder Paweł Ołtuszyk told BusinessCloud that it would instead provide its core banking technology and customisable mobile app to other financial institutions in a B2B pivot, and that its staff of 10 would remain in place.

Now the full reinvention of the company into Keel – a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform shaped by first-hand operating experience – has been revealed.

 

Author: Tim McCloud, CEO, TMC Strategic Communications

It’s easy to look at all CEOs and think that they are all faced with the same pressures and challenges.

But the truth is that when you’re running a business you founded, something you have built from the ground up, you will have had a very different kind of journey from someone leading an established company.

As the business evolves, so does your role. Get ready for change.

In my early days as a business owner, I was much more hands on, with multiple roles and spinning a thousand plates.

What needed doing got done, often by me. Now my role is more about guiding the business and supporting teams.

It can feel like you’re further removed from the reason you founded the business as you move from a start-up to an established business, but that’s a sign of success.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Vodafone fell 8% today despite reporting total revenue growth of 8% in FY26 to €40.5 billion.

The telecoms giant expects to see profit before tax of almost £1.9bn, compared to a £1.5bn loss in FY25, as it simplifies its business.

It also recently announced plans to take full ownership of VodafoneThree after agreeing a £4.3bn deal to buy the 49% stake it does not already own. That deal is set to complete in the second half of 2026.

However investor sentiment was dampened by the decision to pause share buybacks to prioritise taking full control of the joint venture; disappointing results in Germany, its largest market; and missing its overall adjusted earnings forecast.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Intertek Group plc have jumped 7% today – the highest of any firm on the FTSE 100 – after Swedish private equity firm EQT made a fourth and final takeover bid of £9.4 billion.

The offer is made up of £9.24bn in cash, with the remainder made up by the final dividend for 2025 announced earlier this year should this be approved by shareholders at the firm’s annual general meeting on 20th May 2026.

EQT saw its third offer of almost £9bn – £58 per share in cash – rejected last week. Under public market rules, it has until Thursday to submit a firm offer for the FTSE 100 firm or walk away.

Eebz, a digital shelf analytics provider, has launched its new suite of foundation models built for eCommerce data extraction and intelligence.

The models are designed to address long-standing challenges plaguing digital shelf analytics, including data inaccuracy, high operational cost and latency in insights.

Backed by a £10 million investment in AI infrastructure, Eebz says the rollout of its technology marks a significant shift in how brands capture, structure and react to eCommerce intelligence.

The models eliminate false gaps and missed opportunities by moving beyond generic availability tracking, surfacing only the gaps that have genuine commercial impact. The models also enable real-time measurement of market share and sales through continuously updated views of category performance and retailer sell-through, removing reliance on delayed panel data.

In addition, users can identify competitor activity earlier by detecting new product launches and shifts in ranging strategy, weeks or even months, ahead of traditional data sources.

Lifted Ventures has announced a one-year extension of its partnership with the British Business Bank, reinforcing a shared commitment to building a more diverse and inclusive angel investment ecosystem across the UK.

The continued collaboration will further scale the Lifted Ventures Angel Network, increasing regional investment capacity and accelerating the activation of women angel investors nationwide. The partnership is designed to broaden participation in early-stage investment and ensure greater access to capital for female founders across all UK regions.

Building on the success of the initial partnership, both organisations will deepen their focus on addressing long-standing gaps in the early-stage funding landscape particularly the underrepresentation of women as both investors and recipients of angel capital.

A Leeds company whose software provides remote training and support for medics using complex laboratory equipment has set its sights on the Asia-Pacific market after raising a further £1.6m.

Envoke has secured the funding from existing investors NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance, which is managed by Mercia and is part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund, and Finance Yorkshire’s Seedcorn Fund, alongside new investor Foresight Group.

The company has already attracted major US-based equipment manufacturers including Bio-Rad, ThermoFisher Scientific, PacBio and Haemonetics, as well as the NHS and other health services and universities. It is now keen to target a wider global audience.

Envoke’s platform creates a virtual replica of each machine and uses interactive simulations to show staff how to use it. The system also enables remote troubleshooting and maintenance, which means that many problems can be quickly resolved without calling out an engineer.

Author: Matt Hyde, CTO, CloudWize

Unlike a prompt-driven or conversational Large Language Model (LLM), agentic AI is goal-orientated. With access to knowledge, a set of defined instructions outlining what it’s trying to achieve, and the ability to connect to other tools and systems to collect the data it needs, this AI ‘brain’ can operate, reason and learn, without human intervention.

Let’s apply that to a real world use case such as accounts payable. Whereas traditional automation would struggle with inconsistent data across different invoice layouts, supplier-specific quirks or missing fields, a fairly straightforward finance agent could handle invoicing, expenses and reconciliations with ease, alleviating admin by 47%. I’ve also seen an incident outage agent reduce IT downtime by 30%, in what was again a simple use case. But of course the possibilities really are endless, with multi-agent orchestrations capable of handling complex end-to-end e-commerce orders, inclusive of customer fulfilment, for example.

Whatever the brief, AI agents can do much more than follow a script. They’re intelligent enough to follow intricate, multi-step activities, think independently, and handle variation. But this doesn’t mean they’re fully autonomous digital beings – if they were, you wouldn’t want them anywhere near your business.

Happl, a global employee benefits operating system founded by entrepreneur Ben Towers MBE, has raised £8.1 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Portage Ventures.

The round includes participation from F Capital and existing investors Y Combinator, 6 Degrees Capital, Haatch and Ventures Together.

The raise is being celebrated with a billboard in Times Square, New York, alongside Happl’s US banking partner, Brex.

Manchester Games Network, a new business organisation, has launched today to strengthen Greater Manchester’s international reputation in the games sector.

The business-led community aims to promote, connect, and advocate for the video games sector across Greater Manchester. The network will be led by a board with a broad spectrum of games industry knowledge and experience who share a passion for games and for Manchester and its unique place on the global cultural stage.

The board includes Stephen Hey, games marketing veteran; Laura Harper, Partner at Lewis Silkin; Louise Andrew, Head of Studio at d3t; Michael Pattison, VP of Global Publishing at Lightspeed Studios; Carl Jones, games industry consultant; and Caroline White, creative consultant.

Northstar Ventures has announced a £300,000 investment from the new North East Spinout Inspire Fund into H2CHP, a pioneering cleantech company and a spinout of Durham
University.

The commitment forms part of a round of £1.5m alongside £500,000 from Blackfinch Ventures and £700,000 of grant funding from Innovate UK’s investor partnership programme to develop a linear electric generator that does not utilise permanent magnets and rare-earth materials, which will help remove a significant supply-chain risk.

H2CHP is developing next-generation distributed electric generators for use in data centres, ports, construction, backup power, and microgrid deployment. Its fuel-flexible technology, which means the high-efficiency generators can be run on hydrogen, ammonia, biofuels and e-fuels, helps mitigate supply-chain risk, cut carbon emissions and improve performance.

The company aims to disrupt the multibillion-dollar global generator market, aided by rising pressure to reduce emissions and persistent grid reliability challenges.