Author: Jonathan Symcox

Uber rival Lyft has agreed to acquire the UK business of Gett as it expands into London.

Gett is an app which features three-quarters of London’s black cabs and has built B2B relationships with clients ranging from London’s largest corporations to historic venues and major public sector organisations. 

The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks and will nearly double the number of rides on the Lyft platform in London, Europe’s largest taxi and ride-hail market.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Belfast tech firm Cloudsmith has raised £53 million in Series C funding.

Cloudsmith has built a platform for the era of AI-driven software development and is used by some of the world’s leading enterprises.

It only raised Series B funding a year ago and both rounds were led by TCV.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Wi-Fi engagement platform which raised £16 million in funding is to be struck off.

Onvi Tech Ltd, founded in 2016 as Wi-5 Technologies, is registered in Cardiff and built a team of hundreds to target ‘create a new paradigm for in-venue and in-store customer engagement’.

The business was sourced from Wayra, the Telefónica-backed technology accelerator programme, which invested with a view to offering its services to O2 clients in the UK and Telefónica’s clients globally.

It was led by CEO and chief product officer Prask Sutton, who has served as CPO of FinTech 50 firm Round Treasury since September 2024. Sutton is still listed on LinkedIn as holding the CEO/CPO roles at Onvi Tech.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Phlo, QBS Software and PortSwigger were among the big winners at GP Bullhound’s 2026 Northern Tech Awards.

The 13^th edition of the awards were held at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester and were attended by 250 CEOs, entrepreneurs and business leaders from across the digital economy to celebrate innovation and excellence across the North of England.

US bank KeyCorp has acquired the UK entity of corporate finance advisory firm Clearwater.

The agreement builds on the successful collaboration agreement established between Clearwater and KeyCorp in 2020.

The UK business will remain closely connected with colleagues across Europe and will continue to play an active role in supporting collaboration across the firm, strengthening its ability to deliver integrated cross border advice for clients.

Mark Taylor, CEO of Clearwater UK, said: “This is a significant milestone for our business and a major new chapter in Clearwater UK’s growth story.

“Having partnered with Key for many years, we are confident that both organisations know each other extremely well and that our values and cultures closely align.

“We are really pleased that Key recognises the strength and potential of our business, our differentiated model and the calibre of talent in our team.

“Importantly, our service offering to our clients and our core market will remain unchanged, only enhanced.”

Author: Chris Maguire

Manchester-headquartered agency Glass Atlas has acquired Summit, including its proprietary Productcaster platform.

The acquisition will bring the group’s headcount to approximately 240 and combined revenues to £22m.

The financials of the deal have not been revealed but it will strengthen the firm’s capabilities across end-to-end digital transformation, performance marketing, consultancy and product data technology.

In 2025, Glass Atlas was officially launched as a new digital agency following the integration of four established brands: Space 48, Bring Digital, Brave the Skies, and This is Digital.

The acquisition marks another strategic step in Glass Atlas’ growth journey, following investment from Foresight Group.

Jon Woodall, CEO of Glass Atlas, said: “Summit is a business I’ve respected for a long time. It’s built on strong fundamentals. A clear specialism in retail, long-standing client relationships, and a great track record of delivery.

“Productcaster adds an important layer of proprietary technology. As performance marketing becomes increasingly data and automation-driven, having that capability in-house is critical to how we support clients across their broader commerce strategy.

“This acquisition strengthens the platform and positions us well for the next phase of growth.”

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A subsidiary of chipmaking giant Arm has invested a further £50 million into Raspberry Pi.

A secondary share sale saw the Raspberry Pi Foundation divest shares in the listed Cambridge success story, amounting to 5.6% of the firm’s issued share capital, for £60m at a price of 550 pence per share.

It continues to hold 41% of Raspberry Pi’s shares.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Claire Blunt has resigned from the board of Digitalbox plc to focus on her executive role within Steven Bartlett’s media group.

The media industry veteran joined the Dragons’ Den star’s FlightStory last year and is now CFO and COO of his parent group Steven.com.

She joined the board of Digitalbox, which owns Entertainment Daily, The Daily Mash, The Poke and The Tab, in October 2024 as a non-executive director. She also served as the chair of the company’s remuneration committee. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

ASOS Plc halved its losses in its latest six-month results but revenue dropped.

The online fashion giant said losses before tax for the half-year period ended 1st March 2026 were £137.9 million, down from £241.5m in the same period last year (H1 FY25).

GC Angels, the venture capital investment arm of the Growth Company, has led four investments in March 2026 supporting funding totalling £1.87m.

Two of the deals originate from GC Angels’ first Venture Forward accelerator programme, which ran at the end of last year, with a further two investments into existing portfolio companies, demonstrating the continued strength of the programme as a pipeline for high-quality opportunities.

The Venture Forward programme, funded by Innovate UK, is designed to support underrepresented founders across the North as they prepare for their first institutional investment round.

From the first cohort, GC Angels has made a six-figure investment into Breezemove as part of their £750,000 seed round. The business is building a UK PropTech platform designed to streamline and simplify the home-buying process.

GC Angels also led a £345,000 investment into MissionC, a premium wellness brand offering effective, FSA-regulated, and lab-tested CBD, Functional Mushroom, and Shilajit products; stocked by leading retailers such as Selfridges and Holland & Barrett. Both investments provide the businesses with the capital to move beyond early-stage hurdles and accelerate their next phase of growth.

This follows the successful delivery of the first Venture Forward cohort which ran from October to December 2025 in Manchester and has resulted in a total of 9 companies successfully raising investment worth over £2.5m.

Alongside the Venture Forward cohort investments, GC Angels completed two further investments into its existing portfolio. These include a £270k investment into OurPetsLife, a leading premium pet product retailer founded by Elliot Roxby, alongside angel investor and exited founder of Music for Pets, Amman Ahmed. The second follow-on investment was into Gaia Learning, an ed-tech platform for SEND children, which raised £400k alongside NESTA and a syndicate of angel investors.

In early April GC Angels completed delivery of the second Venture Forward cohort in Leeds. In the second cohort, 55% of founders were from an ethnic minority background and 55% were female founders, reflecting the programme’s continued focus on widening access to investment and equipping underrepresented entrepreneurs with the skills, networks and confidence to secure funding.

Cogna has appointed ex-Amazon AI leader Sam Ng as CTO.

Cogna uses AI to automate the IT consultancy process for critical infrastructure industries including utilities, construction, facilities management and logistics.

Ng brings nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience at startups and public companies spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon and more.

Most recently at Amazon, he led two major engineering programmes. In Amazon AI, his teams owned the language, compiler, framework, and tooling used to build training and inference workloads running on Amazon’s custom Trainium and Inferentia chips.

He also led a 300-person engineering organisation at Kindle, where he built two zero-to-one devices: Kindle Scribe, the first large-format Kindle with writing and notetaking, and Kindle Colorsoft, the first Kindle with a colour display.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A leading firm in the Wales tech scene has entered liquidation.

Amplyfi is an AI-powered market intelligence platform which was backed with more than £7 million investment from Cardiff Capital Region’s flagship fund Innovation Investment Capital and the Development Bank of Wales. 

It delivered insights to businesses by connecting structured and unstructured data at scale to uncover previously hidden links, trends and opportunities – summarising huge volumes of data sourced from millions of documents a day including company websites, news, RSS feeds and scientific papers.

Advancements in generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT have impacted its business and forced the board into a creditors voluntary liquidation. Bethan Evans and John Cullen of insolvency practice Menzies have been appointed joint liquidators.

CEO Paul Teather has ‘ended’ his tenure with a dateline of April 2026 on his LinkedIn profile. Formerly on the board as an investor, he took over the CEO role in 2023.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Aurrigo International plc is to triple the size of its headquarters with a move to Power Park in Coventry.

The self-driving technology leader, which recently announced a £6 million contract with Ultra Global for 25 autonomous guided vehicles, said it would install a test track at the 130,615 square feet site.

It will serve as its UK hub for advanced engineering, autonomous vehicle development, high-volume manufacturing and ongoing automotive activities. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Andrew Higginson is to step down as chair of JD Sports Fashion Plc in a shock move.

He joined Britain’s biggest listed sporting goods group in 2022 and transformed its corporate governance. 

Together with his chief executive hire Regis Schultz, the firm expanded overseas and sold off non-core brands. It says that 40% of its business is now in North America.

Identity specialist GBG said trading was solid in the last financial year.

 

For the year ended 31st March 2026, expected revenue of £285 million represents 3.2% year-on-year growth on a constant currency basis.

FY26 adjusted operating profit will be approximately £67.5m (FY25: £67m).

GBG announced a £175 million refinancing deal last month.

TPXimpact Holdings PLC, a digital transformation partner to the UK public services sector, has reported strong results and hailed the completion of a three-year turnaround.

The AIM-listed firm said for the financial year ended 31st March 2026 it expects to comfortably exceed the recently upgraded consensus across all key financial metrics.

Revenue is expected to be around £78.1m (FY25: £77.3m), representing 1% year-on-year growth and ahead of market consensus of £76.2m.

Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be c.£8.6m (FY25: £5.6m) a 54% year-on-year increase.

“The group’s performance in FY26 marks the successful conclusion of its three-year strategic turnaround. Having met or exceeded all key financial and operational targets, the group has established a profitable, cash-generative platform with a significantly healthier balance sheet,” it stated.

“TPXimpact is now entering its new three-year strategic phase focused on sustainable growth, supported by new business wins of £122m and the recent appointment of Emma Broom as chief growth officer. “

Time To ACT plc, a group focused on technology for the energy transition supply chain, says Gary Wallace has resigned and will step down from the board and his role as CFO on 17^th July 2026.  

It said he leaves on good terms and will remain in the business during this period to ensure an orderly transition of responsibilities.

Eight new firms, including Barclays, Experian, Lloyds Banking Group (Scottish Widows), and UBS, have been chosen by the Financial Conduct Authority to live test AI applications to support safe and responsible deployment.

The FCA is working with its technical partner Advai, a London-based specialist in automated AI assurance, to provide AI Live Testing. This initiative helps successful applicants explore key questions around risk management and live monitoring to support the responsible deployment of AI for consumers and markets.

Applications reflect the fast-evolving nature of the technology, with a diverse range of AI models underpinning use cases – from agentic AI and small language models to emerging solutions such as neurosymbolic AI. Firms in the second group are testing both customer-facing and business‑to‑business use cases, including AI-enabled targeted support for investments, credit score insights for consumers, agentic payments, anti-money laundering detection, and Know Your Customer.

The FCA will also publish a good and poor practice report for AI in financial services later in 2026 to support firms in the safe and responsible adoption of the developing technology.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A former boss of Costa Express has raised £2 million for automated drinks retail platform Unity Coffee.

Founder Scott Martin previously co-founded Coffee Nation, which grew to a network of more than 900 self-service machines. Acquired in 2011 for £59.5 million by Whitbread, these were immediately rebranded as Costa Express.

Martin effectively introduced the first premium self-serve espresso solution to the UK, bringing real coffee and fresh milk to consumers at a time when instant coffee dominated the on-the-go market. It subsequently became a cornerstone of Coca-Cola’s acquisition of Costa Coffee.

Unity is expanding into a market that is rapidly changing how people buy food and drink on the move. It is building an automated retail platform, pairing premium beverages with connected hardware, app-based ordering and payments, and real-time loyalty. 

The funding will be used to roll out 500+ state-of-the-art machines across the next 12 months, scaling its app-first coffee stations into high-footfall venues including gyms, hotels and flexible workspaces, and forecourts.

Audoo, a music technology company redefining public performance royalty distributions, has announced a partnership with Sabam, the Belgian association for authors, composers and publishers.

The partnership will deliver a new approach to DJ reporting powered by the Audio Meter technology from Audoo, which topped our MediaTech 50 ranking last year.

Audoo’s scalable Audio Meter solution captures exactly what is played in real time across live environments – moving away from more complex technology solutions and manual and sample-based reporting. 

The result is more accurate data at scale, enabling royalty distributions based on actual usage. It also increases transparency and supports fairer remuneration for authors, composers and publishers. 

Audoo’s solution is designed for modern venues, including multi-room and multi-zone environments where multiple DJs may be performing simultaneously. Its technology captures music across all areas in parallel, delivering a complete and representative view of what is being played. 

The technology has already been deployed in several live environments in Belgium, where it successfully captured music across complex, multi-stage setups.