PayByPhone, a Hatfield technology provider for mobile parking payments, has promoted Rebecca Maisey to UK MD.

She will continue to report directly to PayByPhone’s President and CEO Jonny Combe.

Maisey, who has been with PayByPhone for 15 years, steps into the role after successfully serving as the company’s UK commercial director.

Sales recruitment and training specialist Furza has expanded with two new divisions focused on executive search and the outsourced management of junior commercial teams in fast-growth businesses.

The move marks the latest phase of Furza’s growth, following a triple-digit revenue increase in 2025.

The company has appointed Emily Bates as business development director to spearhead the expansion of the new divisions, Furza Talent and Furza Enable.

Furza Talent is an executive search service placing high-impact, mid-to-senior revenue and go-to-market professionals into high-growth companies.

Furza Enable provides outsourced management, training and development programmes for in-house sales teams.

Emily has joined Furza from recruitment vendor management platform Hiring Hub, where she was sales manager. Before Hiring Hub, she worked in a business development role at Pareto and as a recruitment consultant at Venturi.

She is the latest addition to Furza’s management team, following the arrival earlier this year of Claire Coulson as head of delivery and operations.

Furza, which is headquartered in Salford and has an office in London, has built its reputation by supporting companies to identify, recruit, train and enable sales talent through managed assessment and hiring programmes, alongside tailored training and development delivered through its academy.

Social agency SocialChain has appointed Tom Fenwick-Smith as executive creative director.

Fenwick-Smith joins from VodafoneThree, where he was senior conceptual creative and strategy social lead.

He will lead the creative department across Brave Bison-owned SocialChain and its sister agency Engage Digital Partners, reporting into SocialChain’s CEO, Jacinta Faul.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Thought Machine has surpassed $100 million in revenue – but an anticipated stock market flotation is at least two years away.

The core banking technology provider has published audited accounts which revealed a previously unpublicised £45 million funding round as well as a fresh £30m from a new investor.

Founder and CEO Paul Taylor told Tech.eu that it has been secured from an unnamed tier 1 bank which also acts as a client.

On the £44.8m Series E quietly raised from existing shareholders in July 2025, Taylor refused to reveal the valuation this put on the business, saying: “We are trying to put less emphasis on valuation and more emphasis on commercial success. 

“Funding rounds are just not where we want the attention to be. We want the attention to be on commercial growth. 

“Hitting revenue targets is a far better indicator of success than saying ‘look how valuable we are’.”

Gyre Energy, an Oxford-founded energy tech company using AI and thermal energy storage to cut the cost and energy demand of industrial cooling, has secured around £1m in investment and grant funding as it expands work with larger enterprise customers.

The pre-seed round, led by Speedinvest with participation from Rule 30 and Plug and Play, has funded Gyre’s growth into large-scale cold chain environments including one of the world’s largest logistics companies responsible for moving and storing temperature-sensitive goods across global supply chains.

Gyre will install its AI-driven cooling optimisation and thermal energy storage platform within a chamber of a 140,000 square foot cold chain operation, with performance measured against an IPMVP baseline. Gyre’s AI analyses how the site behaves, forecasts cooling demand, and optimises the system to cut overall energy use while maintaining temperature stability. Its thermal energy storage then stores cooling capacity when energy is cheaper and greener, releasing it during expensive peak periods so the equipment runs less when power costs most.

The deployment is Gyre’s most significant to date, its first with a global logistics leader, and comes as heatwaves across Europe and other regions place growing pressure on cold chains, buildings, power grids and cooling infrastructure.

Palatine Private Equity has invested in OryxAlign, a specialist provider of mission-critical network design, build and managed IT services.

The strategic partnership will accelerate London-based OryxAlign’s growth across its core markets, including the fast-growing data centre and built environment sectors. 

The partnership will provide the platform and capital to pursue both organic growth and targeted strategic M&A.

 

Shares in Raspberry Pi Holdings plc climbed 5% today after it announced it had appointed Tim Powell as its next CFO.

The Cambridge-based firm said Powell, who brings over 20 years’ leadership experience across fast-growing public companies, will join as its finance chief and as a director with effect from 16th October 2026.

Last October current CFO Richard Boult informed the board of his intention to step down. He will leave at the end of October.

Gateshead-based TSG has completed its third acquisition since its management buyout.

The IT service provider, which serves mid-market businesses in the UK, has acquired Creative Computing Solutions, an established Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner known for its work with the likes of Hat Trick Productions, whose credits include programmes such as Derry Girls, Outnumbered and Have I Got News For You.

Based in Maidenhead, Creative Computing Solutions has around 100 customers and offers a particular specialism in the production and media sectors. The acquisition will see Creative Computing Solutions’ CEO, Justin Farmiloe, step into the TSG management team as CTO, while the business’s existing contracts, support arrangements, and the intellectual property of all bespoke customer solutions will remain unchanged.

TaiSan – a London company whose technology could unlock the use of sodium-ion batteries for mass market applications such as electric bikes, scooters, vehicles and power tools – has raised £4.65 million.

The round was co-led by Eos Advisory, and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II through fund manager Mercia Ventures, with participation from AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, angel François Badelon, and existing investors InnoEnergy, TSP Ventures, Exergon, and Heartfelt. 

Of the total raised, £700,000 came from Innovate UK, which provided grant funding through its Investor Partnerships Programme to match fund part of the private investment.

IRIS Software Group, a leading global software provider of accountancy, payroll, HR, and education solutions, has appointed Surya Sagi as its first chief data and AI officer.

The newly created role reflects IRIS’ commitment to helping customers unlock even greater value from their solutions and data, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver faster insights and better-informed decisions. It also supports the company’s next phase of product innovation and global growth.

Sagi brings more than 30 years of experience building data and AI platforms, scaling cloud-native SaaS businesses, and leading M&A and platform integration across SMB, enterprise, and regulated environments.

His track record of building and scaling platforms has helped customers achieve better outcomes while accelerating growth and strengthening governance. He most recently founded ARKA AI and ARKA Advisors, helping enterprises successfully transition from AI experimentation to governed, outcome-driven implementation. Prior to that, Sagi served as CTO at Pitney Bowes.

Co-Ride, a community-driven carpooling and ride-sharing app made in Sunderland, has launched in beta and is now accepting sign-ups from commuters across the UK.

Co-Ride connects local drivers with passengers travelling the same route. The platform lets users split petrol, parking, and car costs fairly, reach their destinations faster through smart route matching, and reduce their carbon footprint by filling seats that would otherwise sit empty.

Getting started takes minutes: users create a free profile, add their daily route, get matched with nearby riders, and share the journey. Trust and safety are built in from day one, with verified profiles, in-app chat, ratings and reviews, and transparent cost-sharing.

Co-Ride is designed for a broad range of travellers – daily commuters looking to cut costs, students sharing lifts to campus, professionals in corporate offices, and eco-conscious individuals. The company also offers corporate solutions to help employers reduce parking demand, support sustainability goals, and improve employee wellbeing.

Revolver Therapeutics, a University of Bath spin-out developing a new class of cancer therapeutics that target ‘undruggable’ transcription factors, has secured a further £572k funding round led by QantX, with follow-on investment from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) (managed by Future Planet Capital), as well as from the University of Bath.

The funding supports a novel approach to treating colorectal cancers by shutting down transcription factors, which have been considered to be ‘undruggable’. Transcription factors act like master regulators of disease inside cells, controlling which genes are turned on or off.

In cancer, they can drive tumour growth, survival and resistance to treatment. But they have been notoriously hard to target with conventional drugs: they sit deep inside the cell’s nucleus and lack the ‘binding pockets’ that conventional small molecules typically dock into.

Revolver’s treatments are built around specially designed peptides – small, protein-like molecules – discovered using its proprietary Transcription Block Survival platform, a technology spun out of the University of Bath. The platform finds peptides that can get inside cells and switch off these previously unreachable targets, overcoming a long-standing barrier that has held back this kind of therapy.

The new funding will allow Revolver to develop both its platform and its pipeline of new treatments for colorectal cancer with unmet medical needs.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Raspberry Pi Holdings plc has appointed Tim Powell as CFO and as a director, with effect from 16th October 2026.

The Cambridge-based firm is behind low-cost miniature computers which were initially used extensively in education before becoming a favourite among hobbyists.

The company, which listed in 2024, said recently that it is “graduating from maker culture and hobbyist fan fave to something more mature”. It has seen demand for its products from original equipment manufacturers and other enterprise customers.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The American owner of Sky has agreed a £1.6 billion deal to acquire the broadcast arm of ITV.

The deal, which includes ITV’s free-to-air channels and on-demand streaming service ITVX, creates the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster.

ITV plc said US telecoms giant Comcast had agreed to sell Sky’s Love Productions business to ITV Studios as part of the package.

ITV Studios, one of the world’s biggest production companies – behind shows including I’m a Celebrity… – will remain listed on the London Stock Exchange.

BGF has surpassed £5 billion in investments, 15 years after it was established to address a structural funding gap in the UK mid-market.

The investor provides long-term, flexible capital to SMEs and invests through minority stakes, allowing entrepreneurs and founders to retain ownership and control. BGF has backed over 650 companies across a network of 15 offices, with 74% of its capital deployed outside of London.

It has generated £3.7 billion in proceeds across more than 280 exits, across growth and early stage businesses. BGF-backed companies have delivered more than £8.2 billion in revenue growth, while its portfolio has created over 35,000 jobs.

BGF crossed the £5 billion milestone with its third investment in Gaussion, a UCL and Faraday Institution spinout pioneering technology that uses an external magnetic field to improve the performance and lifespan of battery systems.

Worldmodeldata, a Cambridge-based startup building the world’s largest database of video game-generated training data for next-generation AI, has raised £7m in seed funding as it emerges from stealth. 

The round was led by Iona Star Capital, a London-based venture capital fund focused on early-stage companies operating at the intersection of AI, data and technology.

The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Rhea Loucas and is supported by Lord Richard Allan, UK technology policy specialist and Meta’s former VP of Public Policy, who joins the board as chairman. 

 

FinTech startup Stoa has raised £1.8 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate the growth of its cash management platform, which enables consumers and businesses to unlock upfront lifestyle and business value from idle cash deposits.

The round was co-led by Bespokeist Partners and Ingenii Capital, with participation from Force Over Mass Capital and Fuel Ventures, alongside senior financial services angels including Suneel Hargunani, formerly of Citi, Rachel Sestini, partner at Shaw Gibbs group and co-founder of Canopy Capital, and other leaders from major global institutions.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

There is a changing of the guard in the drinks industry – and Manchester brand Hip Pop is at the forefront of the trend.

Originally known as Booch & Brew, it all started back in 2019 in co-founder Emma Thackray’s kitchen.

“Kenny [Goodman], the other co-founder, has a real issue with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome),” CEO Matt Bowler-Jones tells me for Founder Friday.

“Meanwhile Emma had discovered kombucha brewing – and its benefits for gut health – while living in the United States.

“They [and their partners] met when they were looking for childcare and started talking about this.”

Emma was the founder of Hello Pure, a nutritional supplements brand which was acquired in 2021, while Kenny is a serial entrepreneur.

“They said: Why don’t we do this?” continues Matt.

Emma began brewing small-batch kombucha recipes using real fruit and live cultures in jars in her kitchen in Altrincham.

Two years later the fermentation was moved to a farm in Cheshire and the business was renamed Hip Pop. By 2023, the microbrewery had taken up residence in the iconic railway arches on North Western Street in Manchester.

Today it has 10 canned drinks available: four sodas, four kombuchas and two kombuchas containing CBD.

So how did we get here?

SME finance platform Funding Circle has appointed Tamsin Todd as an independent non-executive director.

Todd is a former CEO of Findmypast, managing director at TUI Group, head of eCommerce at Betfair, and previously held marketing, product and commercial roles at Microsoft and Amazon.

She is currently a NED at The Gym Group plc, Auction Technology Group plc and INTO University Partnerships.

Neil Rimer will step down as a NED from 30th September 2026.

MedPal AI Plc has raised £5m in a share placing just three months after raising £3m.

The funding will be used to complete the acquisition of Solid State Technologies Ltd, a profitable electronic Medicines Administration Record software business, completing MedPal’s closed-loop care-home medication platform.

It also positions the company to capture the UK launch of the oral GLP-1 weight-loss pill (oral Wegovy), launching in the UK on Monday, through investment in stock and patient acquisition.