PropTech Vertical, based in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, has appointed Dan Alvarez as its new group chief revenue officer.

Vertical delivers smart energy solutions that simplify energy management for landlords, students, and residential customers.

Alvarez has over 30 years of experience of transforming and driving scalable growth within a number of UK businesses including Vitrifi, Vorboss and Glide, where he specialised in building structured, high-performing operations and fostering collaborative team cultures.

He will oversee all customer, revenue, and marketing related functions across the group’s portfolio of brands including The Student Energy Group, Do Energy and Tickd.

ThinCats, the leading alternative finance provider to mid-sized SMEs in the UK, has appointed Dan Houman as senior director, origination.

Focused on owner-managed businesses, Houman will be based in Yorkshire and work with SMEs across the county and the North East to help them access the funding they need to grow.

He has held senior roles at Virgin Money, OakNorth and Santander.

His role will help strengthen collaboration across the Shawbrook Group’s lending platforms, giving regional businesses access to a wider range of funding solutions.

Manchester tech unicorn Matillion has appointed a chief revenue officer.

The firm, builder of the AI data automation platform ‘Maia’, said Tim O’Neil will bring deep expertise in enterprise data software from leadership roles at Alation and ThoughtSpot.

Matillion said organisations including Merck, EDF and GE Healthcare are using Maia to automate data workflows that previously demanded significant manual effort — freeing their teams to focus on building data products rather than managing pipeline complexity.

Maia works natively within ecosystem platforms, integrating tightly with Snowflake, AWS and Databricks, and leveraging AI labs models, like Anthropic, to deliver automation where enterprises already operate.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Maven Capital Partners has completed a £15 million investment in Chorus Intelligence.

The fast-growing investigation software specialist, founded in 2011, has a 15-year track record of developing and deploying digital investigation software, used by law enforcement, government agencies and corporations. 

Based in Woodbridge, near Ipswich, the company recently launched the Chorus Intelligence Suite, which is being rapidly adopted across its key UK and US markets. 

The UK government is investing £45 million for a 1.4MW mission-focused supercomputer named ‘Sunrise’, a key first step in establishing the country’s first AI Growth Zone at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s (UKAEA) Culham Campus in Oxfordshire.

As announced in the Fusion Strategy, Sunrise is targeted for operation in June this year and is primed to be the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy. Funded by the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), Sunrise will tackle key fusion energy challenges in areas such as plasma turbulence, materials development and tritium fuel breeding, while delivering spillover benefits to other clean energy technologies and the UK’s broader net zero ambitions.

Sunrise will also strengthen essential AI capabilities at Culham Campus and across the UK’s high-performance computing landscape, contributing to the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI for Science Strategy.

Sunrise will see AMD, DESNZ, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Dell Technologies, Intel, UKAEA, the University of Cambridge, and WEKA working together.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

An American payments giant is preparing a swoop for UK FinTech CAB Payments.

StoneX, a Fortune 500 firm listed on New York’s Nasdaq exchange, is considering a bid for CAB Payments, which has endured a torrid time as a listed company.

CAB has rejected two rival takeovers from shareholder Helios Consortium and StoneX said it was hopeful of winning the support from the company’s shareholders, including Helios, before it tables the bid officially.

Author: Chris Maguire

Unseen Group has announced the completion of its 11^th acquisition with the addition of employee content platform Seenit.

Seenit is an employee-generated video platform used by companies including Amazon and Vodafone to create authentic content that supports talent attraction, retention and development.

Unseen Group combines assessment technology, psychometric design, candidate engagement and onboarding, and recruitment support solutions to help employers deliver fair, data-driven and high-impact recruitment and development experiences.

Zac Williams, CEO of Unseen Group, said: “Seenit is a perfect fit for our refined employer-led offering and further solidifies Unseen as a leading provider of talent tools, spanning from candidate engagement, through to screening, assessments, onboarding and employee development.”

Emily Forbes, founder of Seenit, said: “From my first meeting with Zac, it was clear our missions were aligned and that Unseen was building something ambitious.”

Author: Chris Maguire

Sweden-based legal AI startup Legora has been valued at $5.5bn after announcing a $550m Series D fundraise.

The round was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, ICONIQ, Redpoint Ventures, and Y Combinator, as well as new investors, including Alkeon Capital, Bain Capital, Firstmark Capital, Menlo Ventures, Sands Capital, Starwood Capital and Salesforce Ventures.

The investment will be used to accelerate its expansion across the US.

Legora (formerly known as Leya) was founded in 2023 and has built an AI platform for lawyers.

In the last 12 months, the LegalTech startup has grown from 40 to 400 team members across Stockholm, London, New York, Denver, Sydney, and Bengaluru.

Last year, Deloitte Legal and Legora announced a strategic relationship in the UK that will see the two organisations collaborate to drive the next wave of legal transformation.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A shareholder revolt is aiming to oust the entire board of Physiomics plc.

Physiomics is a mathematical modelling, data science and biometrics company which supports the development of new therapeutics and personalised medicine solutions.

On Friday the Oxfordshire company’s directors received a request requiring the board to convene a shareholder meeting from Michael Whitlow, who holds approximately 13.68% of its shares.

Author: Chris Maguire

A campaign to raise £500,000 in memory of Abi Godfrey, a director of Grant Thornton’s North West corporate finance business who died last month aged 34, has already hit £40k.

Author: Chris Maguire

Rajan Gill was the 10^th candidate to be fired in The Apprentice.

Gill, who proudly describes himself as the only tradesman candidate in this year’s show,  was part of the losing team tasked with creating a virtual reality demo in order to secure  investments.

Project manager Lawrence Rosenberg brought Gill and Levi Hodgetts-Hague back into the boardroom after his team secured £55,000 in investment, compared to the winning team’s £205,000.

Speaking after the show, Gill, whose company – AV Installations – specialises in TV mountings, said: “Opportunities like The Apprentice provide every candidate with the same platform. What really matters is how each of us chooses to use it — how we show up, how we contribute, and how we make the most of the moment.”

There are now 10 candidates vying for Lord Sugar’s £250k investment and mentorship.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Synap was making waves in the Leeds tech scene as far back as 2018 with its revision platform for students.

Fast-forward eight years and two pivots and the EdTech 50 star now provides technology for administering exams as well as supporting students with their work.

Speaking to Founder Friday on top of Bruntwood SciTech’s Platform building, Dr James Gupta – who co-founded the platform to help with his medical studies in Leeds – explains why the West Yorkshire city is a great place to start a business.

With universities – including Ivy League institutions – employers and regulated sectors using the platform, as well as private EdTech and tutoring companies, he says the creative and agile startup transforms into a military-style operation on exam day – which is a “nice mix”.

“I wouldn’t change it for the world,” he says.

The EDM (electronic dance music) and Metallica fan also tells us how he likes to unwind when not working on the business – he and his wife spent two weeks at music festivals last year!

Author: Tim Follett, founder & CEO, StructureFlow

Before founding StructureFlow, I spent eight years as a corporate lawyer at Slaughter and May and Farrer & Co, advising on highly complex, high-stakes transactions. 

These were multi-billion-pound deals involving layers of entities across multiple jurisdictions, with ownership, control and risk constantly shifting as negotiations evolved.

To manage that complexity, we relied on structure charts, timelines and diagrams. They were essential. They imposed order on something that would otherwise be overwhelming. But they were also static and slow to build. Worse, every time a deal changed, someone had to rebuild the picture.

Documents and diagrams made things readable, but not truly navigable. They flattened dynamic relationships into snapshots. As structures evolved, those snapshots quickly became outdated.

That’s where risk crept in. Not because anyone was careless, but because the tools weren’t built for constantly shifting complexity.

Author: Rebecca Fox, founder, Relentica

I’m a leader who cares deeply about people and commercial outcomes.

Sometimes those two things feel in conflict. Leadership is hard. It can be lonely. You have to make difficult decisions grounded in commercial, environmental, political and emotional reality.

I’m far from perfect, but what drives me is making the best decision available with the information in front of me – and helping others do the same.

I’ve always been technically minded. I could code at eight, thanks to having a Dad who was a computer science teacher. 

But technology doesn’t teach you leadership. That came later – through mistakes, hard lessons, hard work, and learning how to align people around outcomes.

GTSE co-founder and eCommerce director Tom Armenante doesn’t pretend the last few months have been calm.

Having recently moved his family from Leeds to Manchester just before Christmas, he describes life as “very busy” – not least because he’s balancing the demands of scaling a fast-growing eCommerce business with family life.

“I’ve got a little one-year-old baby and a four-year-old,” he told us recently. “Life is chaotic.”

But that’s very much in keeping with GTSE’s story – a business built on momentum, constant iteration and a drive to make buying trade consumables easier for customers.

Shares in a London-based tissue engineering firm have dropped by a third in the first hour of trading this morning after a 15 million funding deal fell through.

BSF Enterprise PLC’s subsidiaries include lab-grown leather, corneal repair and cell-culture media supplements – the latter a spinout from Newcastle University. It also has operations in Hong Kong.

The proposed £15m equity raise, backed by Blackstone Mercantile Group, was to accelerate commercialisation plans.

CrawlJobs, a global job aggregation platform focused on indexing vacancies directly from employer career pages, has completed its first external funding round at £2.2 million.

The new capital will support the continued expansion of the company’s AI-powered crawling infrastructure and help accelerate the commercial rollout of new products being developed within the wider group.

Founded in London in 2024, CrawlJobs was built to address a major structural weakness in online job discovery. While many candidates rely on traditional job boards, a large number of openings are published only on company career sites, regional recruitment pages, or localised hiring portals.

CrawlJobs is designed to capture those opportunities closer to the source, giving job seekers broader and more up-to-date visibility into the market.

Instead of depending solely on employer submissions or third-party reposting, the platform uses AIdriven crawling technology to continuously detect and structure vacancies from company websites. This enables faster discovery of openings that may otherwise remain fragmented, delayed, or difficult to find through conventional channels.

The UK economy failed to grow in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The performance is bad news for the government as it covers a period before the Middle East conflict started.

The zero growth was weaker than had been predicted, and followed growth of just 0.1 per cent in December and 0.2 per cent in November.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warned this week that the longer the conflict lasts in the Middle East, the more likely it is that there will be an effect on the UK economy.

EnSilica plc, a fabless, application-specific chipmaker, has raised approximately £9.7 million through a placing and subscription of new ordinary shares

The Abingdon firm has also launched an offer to retail investors via the BookBuild Platform which aims to raise up to £300,000.

The first tranche of the placing of approximately £4.54m is expected to complete next week, with the second tranche of approximately £5.16m expected to complete on or around 8th April 2026.

Author: Chris Maguire

InsurTech Loxa has successfully closed its £2.7m seed round, completed across three tranches.

The round was backed primarily by angels and family offices, including the Lazaroo-Hood Group, with introductions facilitated by Angel Investment Network, FundMyPitch, and the Entrepreneur’s Collective.

Capital will be deployed to drive EU expansion, scale Loxa’s retail network to 150 live partners, and broaden the platform to support every insurable product category.

Jamie Hamer, co-founder and CEO of Loxa, said: “We started Loxa because we believed embedded product protection should be as universal as the checkout itself, available to every retailer, for every customer, everywhere.

“We made a deliberate choice to build this round with angels and operators who shared our mission and backed our vision from the start, and that alignment builds better businesses.

“Closing this round means we can now  deliver on that promise at scale, with the right people and resources to execute successfully.”

Loxaʼs technology connects natively to over 70% of UK ecommerce infrastructure via apps for Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and BigCommerce, as well as direct API integrations.

Loxa enables retailers to go live in as little as 48 hours.