Arsenal Football Club has signed a multi-year deal with Zilch, a consumer payments platform.

The global partnership, which marks Zilch’s first foray into sports, spans both men’s and women’s teams, and will make available Zilch’s range of flexible payment options to Arsenal supporters.

The agreement will also offer Arsenal supporters benefits every time they spend with Zilch.

 

A Manchester startup aiming to using technology to connect and strengthen local communities has unveiled new platforms and members in its advisory team.

Circle of Trust says it will refine and simplify its current offering while launching a new complementary platform, creating a suite of three products that connect people locally – but on a global scale.

The next phase of the Circle of Trust app is Recommenda, which helps people to discover and support local businesses through trusted, word-of-mouth recommendations.

Meanwhile, The CircleOf is a hyperlocal website expanding as a white-label solution for councils and place partners to showcase events, jobs and community support.

And Circles is a new space connecting business, recreational and social communities to build stronger local and professional networks.

To support this next phase, the Circle of Trust team is welcoming several people to its advisory team.

The British Business Bank has announced that Aegon UK, NatWest Cushon and M&G are the partners for the first close of the British Growth Partnership Fund I. 

The Bank is targeting a first close of £200m by the end of the financial year, enabling the fund to begin investing into high growth UK companies in 2026.

All parties have now completed investment diligence and are finalising terms and structuring.

Risers:

Hammerson – +6.58%
CMC Markets – +5.42%
Telecom Plus – +4.86%
Persimmon – +4.83%
ME Group – +4.79%

Fallers:

Ithaca Energy- -12.85%
Integrafin – -4.92%
Ceres Power – -4.89%
Harbour Energy – -4.68%
Polar Capital – -4.16%

The Government has committed billions in investment among a raft of AI measures ahead of next week’s Budget.

AI ambassadors have been appointed including Simon Johnson, the Nobel prize-winning Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who will act as a standard bearer with public services and businesses. 

Monzo co-founder and Y Combinator general partner Tom Blomfield will champion British startups to scale up and attract talent and investment.

Google DeepMind VP of research Raia Hadsell will champion the UK’s place at the forefront of AI innovation and security. 

Venture capitalist James Wise will chair a new Sovereign AI Unit, backed by almost £500m in investment, to help build and scale AI capabilities. The unit will bring together Government, industry and investors to become the ‘go-to fund’ for high potential startups and scaleups in the UK. 

The government says it will act as a ‘first customer’ for promising UK startups who are building high-quality AI hardware products but currently struggle to get off the ground without investment. 

The new ‘advance market commitment’ is backed up by up to £100m of government support. 

A new AI Growth Zone in South Wales – with partners including Vantage Data Centers and Microsoft – powered by £10bn investment will create more than 5,000 new jobs for local communities over the next decade, the Government says – including at the former Ford Bridgend Engine Plant.

PolyModels Hub has raised £7 million in a Series A round to accelerate the digital transformation of biopharma process development.

The London firm said the funding will enable it to expand its engineering and product teams and reach more pharmaceutical organisations worldwide.

Developing a new drug typically costs around $2.5 billion, with roughly a quarter of that — about $650 million — spent on process development alone. Across the hundreds of therapies progressing through the pipeline each year, this represents a vast opportunity to make drug development faster, more efficient, and more reproducible.

The Polymodels Hub platform, ModelFlow, brings together advanced modeling, simulation and workflow management in one place. It allows scientists and engineers to design, test and refine manufacturing processes faster.

Author: Chris Maguire

Lindsey Burrow, Collette Roche, Steve Morgan, Michael Ingall, Frank Rothwell and Figen Murray were among the big winners on a glorious night at the 2025 Northern Leaders awards.

Now in their second year, Northern Leaders celebrate the leaders who make the North a better place and were inspired by the late, great Sir Howard Bernstein.

More than 130 people from across the North packed into KPMG’s Manchester office for a glorious celebration of the best of the North.

There were plenty of tears in the room as a video was played at the end of evening of Lindsey Burrow collecting the Northern Leaders Overall Award.

Her husband, rugby legend Rob Burrow, died in 2024 after a brave battle against motor neurone disease (MND).

Earlier in the day she and her three children had joined the Prince of Wales at the official opening of a specialist centre for motor neurone disease (MND) in Leeds named in her late husband’s memory.

Lindsey Burrow, who works as an NHS physiotherapist, is a published author and has helped raised millions of pounds for charity.

She was presented with her award by BusinessCloud’s executive editor Chris Maguire at the home of Leeds Rhinos.

The headline sponsor of Northern Leaders was OBI and the other sponsors were CG, Rochdale Development Agency, GM Business Growth Hub, Lockton and  J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

There were a total of 16 award categories with several regional winners.

Technology trade association techUK’s new Local Digital Index shows that while the UK tech sector continues to outperform most of the economy, growth remains uneven.

The sector contributes £101 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) and employs 1.7 million people.

Yet growth and investment remain too heavily concentrated in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, the research finds, despite world-class potential across the whole of the UK.

Drawing on 23 economic, connectivity, and skills indicators, the Index provides local leaders, investors and policymakers with a clear picture of where and how the UK’s digital economy can grow faster and more inclusively.

Vyntelligence has secured £23 million in private equity funding to fuel its expansion in the United States.

The AI video firm has been backed by Blume Equity and Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s 1GT climate fund to assist more frontline workers with smart technology.

Frontline workers use it for jobs as diverse as in-home HVAC/ EV to fibre deployment, boiler maintenance and complex in-field energy infrastructure audits. The AI-enabled video helps engineers to simplify and speed up in-field processes and save hours of lost time in manual reporting and data-gathering. 

It calls upon data gathered over a decade and claims to enable 85% faster deployments, 90% faster customer service resolution, huge emissions savings from unnecessary visits and materials savings from re-works.

Focus Group, a provider of business technology solutions, has acquired Hertfordshire-based Chalkline.

Chalkline specialises in delivering IT managed services to SME businesses across the UK, with particular strength in the London area.

Trading since 2016, it claims to have built advanced automation tools with deep expertise in Microsoft solutions.

The UK Space Agency is investing £6.9 million in satellite technology that aims to transform connectivity and secure Britain’s place as a European space leader.

The funding will support five groundbreaking projects through the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ARTES (Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems) programme.

The five UK-led projects span critical areas of innovation in satellite communications, from refuelling satellites to extend their lifespans, to developing 5G networks and optical links that will improve global connectivity.

Orbit Fab will deliver the Advancing Satcom Technology with Refuelling and Logistics (ASTRAL) project with a total UK funding of up to £2.9 million. The contract for the first stage of the mission, worth £1.3 million, has now been awarded by ESA. This mission will prove the capability to refuel electric propulsion satellites using UK-developed technology, ensuring satellites can remain in orbit for longer or can manoeuvre away from threats.

Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall will lead the AGILE: Antenna Ground Interface and LunaNet Equipment project, supported by £1.6 million in funding. Amidst the growing number of lunar missions, this project will produce an interface unit that can be installed in global antennas to communicate with spacecraft using the internationally recognised LunaNet specification. This will allow missions to seamlessly connect to ground infrastructure, improving mission success rates.

Vicinity Technologies will receive £1.19 million for its 5G NTN-based Satellite Access Networks project. The team will design and develop a versatile 5G Non-Terrestrial Network regenerative payload system and user terminals, including the entire software stack for both space and ground segments. This technology will support uninterrupted and scalable internet services globally, from hard-to-reach areas to smart cities.

Archangel Lightworks, working with the support of Eutelsat will advance optical communications through the Space Optical Link Integration Study (SOLIS) project, funded with £356,000. This study, delivered under ESA’s Sunrise programme, will investigate use cases for deploying Free Space Optical Communications technology within Eutelsat’s OneWeb LEO global network.

Finally, Inmarsat Navigation Ventures Ltd (Viasat UK) will receive £881,000 for the International Virtual Satellite Operators Network (Phase 2) project. This initiative will develop a service that enables governments to plan, procure, manage and monitor satellite communications services from Viasat and other providers, ensuring secure and coherent management of critical communications.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

London-based investor Hg has agreed the sale of Intelerad, a global leader in medical imaging software solutions, to GE HealthCare in a transaction valued at approximately $2.3 billion. 

Hg is an investor in European and transatlantic software, services. and data businesses. It will fully exit its majority shareholding in Intelerad, while TA Associates and Ardan Equity will exit minority positions in the business.

Hg partnered on the original Intelerad investment with Ardan Equity. During Hg’s ownership, Canada-based Intelerad has increased its revenue by over 3.5 times, transforming it into one of the world’s leading enterprise imaging platforms.

The business now serves 1,500+ global customers, supports over 230 million exams per year, and manages 8 billion medical images across its network.

Two former senior figures at Manchester-based AI software business Peak AI have hit the ground running with a new venture helping to fuel growth for SMEs through share option schemes.

John Fraser and Rachel Westwell were finance director and head of legal respectively at Peak, and managed the company’s sale to UiPath earlier this year.

Before that they designed and ran Peak’s share option schemes though $120m of investment rounds.

Now they have set up equiCraft, using their experience to design, implement, maintain and optimise company share option schemes.

They say these are increasingly being seen as a valuable compensation and reward tool among ambitious startups and scaleups, especially in the tech sector, as a way to attract, retain and incentivise top talent.

Digital bank Zopa Group PLC has entered the investments market.

Zopa, which has 1.6 million customers, says it is offering simple solutions for long-term financial planning.

Zopa Investments sits alongside its other products such as the Zopa Cash ISA and Biscuit Current Account.

At launch, Zopa will offer two funds, Balanced and Bold, with a track record of 4.5% and 9.3% average annual returns respectively, available in General Investment and ISA wrappers.

West Ham United has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AI specialist Crayon to develop what is being described as one of football’s most advanced scouting platforms. 

The Premier League club says the generative AI-powered system will overhaul how it identifies and evaluates talent across global markets.

It makes The Hammers the first in world football to deploy an end-to-end generative AI scouting tool tailored specifically for its first team and academy.

Built using AWS technologies including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, the platform will combine AI, machine learning and generative AI to analyse large volumes of player data. 

Novidian, a startup focused on helping early-stage tech companies scale, has been awarded a competitive grant from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The funding will accelerate the growth of Novidian’s flagship platform, CTO in Your Pocket, which provides flexible, on-demand technical leadership for startups navigating the critical MVP-to-scale phase.

CTO in Your Pocket was designed to solve a common founder pain point: how to access strategic technical guidance without the cost or commitment of a full-time CTO.

The platform offers tailored support across architecture, delivery, hiring, and tooling, helping founders make smarter decisions, avoid costly missteps, and build scalable systems from day one.

Swansea HealthTech Cosi Care has secured $1 million in US investment after being named one of five winners of the 43North startup competition in Buffalo, New York.

Founded by Lauren Bell in 2018, Cosi Care has developed the world’s first safe scratching medical device designed to relieve the symptoms of eczema and chronic skin irritation.

The company has already generated £3m in revenue and served over 50,000 UK customers, and now plans to use the investment to expand into the US market.

Cosi Care was the only UK company to win this year’s competition and also took home the People’s Choice Award, adding a further $25,000 to their prize.

Risers:

CMC Markets – +29.88%

Halma – +13.04%

Games Workshop Group – +11.93%

Atalaya Mining Copper – +6.49%

NCC Group – +5.93%

Fallers:

Paypoint – -17.54%

Senior – -9.68%

Dr Martens – -9.31%

Foresight Solar Fund – -7.19%

Johnson Matthey – -4.60%

Shares in CMC Markets have rocketed today as the company now expects FY2026 net operating income to be around 10% ahead of market expectations. It has also signed its largest-ever institutional deal, partnering with Westpac, Australia’s second-largest bank. Net operating income is up 5% year-on-year to £186.2 million with increases in net trading and investing revenues.

Halma is also up as the company is on for its 23rd consecutive year of record growth, whilst Paypoint has dipped after results showed that underlying profit before tax dropped 4.5% year-on-year to £25.7m.

Other notable movers are:

NCC Group – +4.94%

Pinewood Technologies Group – +4.79%

JD Sports – -2.96%

Vodafone – -2.09%

Independent payment orchestration provider BR-DGE has partnered with THG Ingenuity to deliver BR-DGE Vault – a PCI-compliant hybrid tokenisation solution.

The Manchester-based company will implement BR-DGE Vault across more than 250 online stores in an attempt to reduce PCI compliance overheads while delivering measurable gains in authorisation rates.

The solution is designed to enhance payment performance and stability during high-volume trading events such as Black Friday.

Edinburgh-founded BR-DGE’s platform processes millions of transactions each month, helping clients boost payment performance and resilience at scale.

Tracsis plc has reported its results for the year ended 31st July 2025.

The transport technology provider, headquartered in Leeds, saw revenue climb 1% to £81.9m, while profit before tax was up 60% to £1.6m.

Adjusted EBITDA was down 1% to £12.6m.