Author: Jonathan Symcox

The parent company of CurrentBody has reported its 2025 results – and it is good news for shareholders.

The Beauty Tech Group plc said in January that it expected revenues and adjusted EBITDA of at least £136 million and £35.5m respectively, compared with earlier projections of £128m and £32m.

Today it reported the final results, with total revenue coming in at £141m – 39.4% higher than 2024 – and adjusted EBITDA of £37.5m (+63.8%).

The Cheshire firm launched on the London Stock Exchange in October with a share price of 271 pence – valuing it at £300m.

It is down slightly in trading today but up 7% in the year to date and 8% on its IPO price.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Mercia Asset Management PLC has risen 10% so far today after it said this morning that it expects FY26 EBITDA to be ‘materially ahead of expectations’.

The regionally focused investor, which has over £2 billion of assets under management, pointed to notification of proposed increases to existing fund mandates, plus successful VCT and EIS fundraises, in the final three months of the year.

These totalled in excess of £200 million, which Mercia said “represents a strong and continuing endorsement of our asset management growth strategy, particularly in the context of the current turbulent market conditions”. 

Lua, billed as an operating system for human-agent collaboration in the workspace, has secured £4.3m in funding led by Norrsken22.

Additional investors include Flourish Ventures, 20VC, P1 Ventures, Phosphor Capital and Y Combinator along with notable angels Henri Stern (CEO Privy), Kaz Nejatian (CEO of Opendoor) and Med Benmansour (CEO of Nuitee).

Lua enables any team, regardless of technical depth, to build, own, and manage their own agent workforce from day one. The company is founded by Lorcan O’Cathain and Stefan Kruger, who met while scaling a FinTech business in East Africa – Lorcan as COO, Stefan as CTO.

Before Lua, Lorcan was MD of Zephyr Management’s Africa business, a leading VC/PE fund operating across Africa, India and Sri Lanka. Stefan was VP of Engineering at Paystack, joining before the Stripe acquisition.

Lua will use the funding to continue to build out its developer community and the Lua Implementation Network, a growing community of independent partners deploying Lua agent workforces in their own markets around the world.

Since launching its agent developer platform in October 2025, Lua has grown revenue close to 30% week-on-week. In February 2026 alone, more agents were built on Lua than in the entire cumulative period since launch.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Applied Nutrition plc have dropped around 5.5% in trading today after JD Sports Fashion plc said it is selling its holding.

The Liverpool firm, founded by fitness enthusiast Thomas Ryder in 2014, recently reported record half-year results 18 months after it floated in London.

Selling at a price of £2.15 per placing share – which in aggregate represent 9.1% of the company’s issued share capital – gross proceeds from the placing will amount to approximately £49 million.

 

Yorkshire Software as a Service firm Adventoris has strengthened its team with four new hires and three internal promotions as the business scales following 18 new client wins and growing demand for its flagship platform, SwiftCloud.

The new appointments span business development, implementation and customer support, taking total headcount to 42. Andy Lau joins as business development executive, Cameron Mercer as implementation consultant, Adam Quinn as customer success manager, and Aleksi Zamfirov as first line customer support engineer.

Alongside the new hires, Adventoris has promoted three team members to support its next phase of growth. Joe Tully, previously marketing manager, has been appointed as head of marketing, with former marketing assistant, Niall Smithson, taking on the marketing manager role. Finn Waterhouse, who initially joined the firm as a junior developer, has progressed to a developer role.

SwiftCloud is a B2B eCommerce platform which helps businesses save time, reduce manual order processing and increase both monthly sales volumes and average basket values. The platform supports over 220 major clients including Tilda Rice, Pepsi Co. and STAEDTLER, across a range of sectors.

The British Business Bank has agreed to make a £100 million commitment to Apposite Healthcare Growth I, a fund investing to support the growth of health technology companies, primarily in the UK. This will be the British Business Bank’s largest fund commitment to date and is the Bank’s first commitment to Apposite Capital.

Apposite Capital is a specialist healthcare and life sciences investor. Apposite Healthcare Growth I will invest in innovative companies across medical products, diagnostics, life sciences tools, digital health, and pharmaceutical outsourcing services.

The fund aims to address the shortage of scale-up capital for UK life sciences companies approaching a growth inflection, which aligns with the Bank’s strategy to create deeper pools of scale up funding.

An entrepreneurship programme delivered by Catalyst has achieved an 86% entrepreneurial intention rate among participants from underrepresented groups across Northern Ireland, according to independent research commissioned by the organisation.

The independent report, produced by the National Centre for Family Business at DCU Business School, draws on participant survey data from Hello Possible, an entrepreneurship development programme delivered by Catalyst and funded by the Department for the Economy (DfE), alongside interviews conducted with past programme participants.

Hello Possible has been designed to help individuals across Northern Ireland explore self-employment and business creation as a credible pathway, equipping participants with the desire, confidence, capabilities and practical tools required to progress from early-stage curiosity to validated business opportunity. The programme is built on 10-year tested MIT entrepreneurship education structure and methodology.

The research, which examined participants from programmes in Cushendall, Enniskillen, Magherafelt, Portadown and east Belfast – found that 86% of people left the Hello Possible programme strongly interested in starting their own business, while 81% sought to develop their business idea further and 69% signed up for further entrepreneurial learning.

On completing the programme, over two thirds of participants reported greater confidence in their own entrepreneurial skills, 96% said their problem-solving skills had improved and 70% said the programme would help their wider circle of friends or community.

The Hello Possible programme is a Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework focused on understanding customers and validating market need before building solutions – recognising that in an increasingly AI-driven world where technology is accessible, market focus is the critical differentiator.

Participants explore their strengths, values and motivations while developing problem-solving skills, before testing their ideas with real customers in a structured, low-risk way.

ClearBank, the enabler of real-time clearing and embedded banking – now celebrating its 10th year – has reported its results for 2025.

In the UK, ClearBank reported another year of strong performance, delivering its third consecutive year of profitability and continued growth in fee-based income. UK normalised revenue grew 32% to £117.7m in FY 2025, supported by strong demand across embedded banking, agency banking, FX and multi-currency services. UK pretax profit rose 53% to £12.2m, up from £8.0m in FY 2024.

At group level, normalised revenue increased 34% year-on-year to £121.6m, reflecting strong growth in fee income and transaction volumes. This performance underlines the group’s continued shift towards high quality, recurring income streams that are less sensitive to interest rate movements.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Mercia Asset Management PLC has said it expects EBITDA to be ‘materially ahead of expectations’ for the last financial year.

The regionally focused investor, which has over £2 billion of assets under management, pointed to notification of proposed increases to existing fund mandates, plus successful VCT and EIS fundraises, in the final three months of the year.

These totalled in excess of £200 million, which Mercia said “represents a strong and continuing endorsement of our asset management growth strategy, particularly in the context of the current turbulent market conditions”. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Audioboom has revealed that it is in takeover talks with several parties.

In October the global podcast company appointed J Goodwin & Co and Rockefeller Capital as joint financial advisers to carry out a strategic review.

This morning – as it also reports a rise in annual revenues and profits, and a record fourth quarter – it said it had engaged with several interested parties including global media organisations, US and European peer companies and media-focused private equity investment institutions.

“The company is [now] in discussions with a small number of parties who are considering making a cash offer for the company’s entire issued and to be issued share capital,” it stated.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

CAB Payments has agreed an increased £287 million takeover offer from American payments giant StoneX – but any deal will require the blessing of substantial activist investor Helios Consortium.

The Fortune 500 firm, listed on New York’s Nasdaq exchange, had previously seen a £241m bid rejected by CAB’s independent board of directors, which does not include Helios.

Prior to that CAB’s independent board rejected two rival takeovers from Helios – the latter for £213m. After the previous StoneX offer of 95 pence per share was rejected, Helios accused the independent board – which does not include Nitin Kaul and Henry Obi CBE, who represent the interests of Helios – of acting against the interests of shareholders.

In retaliation, CAB accused Helios of “launching an unsolicited firm offer for CAB Payments at an unrecommendable value” which it said was “highly opportunistic”.

This morning CAB said that it was recommending the fresh StoneX offer, which is for 110p per share in cash and represents a premium of 52% to CAB’s closing share price of 72p on 30th January 2026, the last business day before the Helios Consortium first announced a possible offer.

 

IntelliAM AI plc, listed on the challenge Aquis Exchange, has reported a rise in annual revenues.

The provider of AI-driven software solutions for the manufacturing and engineering sectors said group revenue grew by 35% to approximately £5.25 million for the year ended 31st March 2026.

Annual recurring revenue grew 100% to £1.65m.

It expects an adjusted EBITDA loss of £925k, ‘reflecting the material levels of investment during the period’.

Cash at year end was £100k, with short term receivables of £1.4m and undrawn overdraft facilities.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Forbes 30 Under 30 founder who moved the HQ of his startup TraqCheck to London has raised £6 million in Series A funding.

Jaibir Nihal Singh featured on the publication’s Asia AI list in 2025. He is co-CEO with Armaan Mehta, who also co-founded the firm and is – according to LinkedIn – now based in Los Angeles. They maintain an office in New Delhi.

TraqCheck is aiming to replace traditional HR software with AI agents, transforming talent sourcing, screening and background verification.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

James House has been appointed to lead loyalty tech firm Reward following its $230 million takeover by Rezolve Ai in February.

Reward was founded in 2001 by Gavin Dein and operates across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Its cloud-based API platform integrates content, advertising and commerce to deliver experiences for customers. It is behind many bank loyalty programmes seen today from brands such as Visa, NatWest Group and Barclays.

Reward also works with the world’s largest retailers such as McDonald’s, eBay, Deliveroo and Amazon. 

Last year it won backing from Dragons’ Den star Touker Suleyman, who struck a partnership that brought his clothing brand Hawes & Curtis into the company’s global retail network.

Reward – formerly known as Reward Insight – was recently bought by Nasdaq-listed Rezolve Ai PLC, a global provider of AI-driven conversational commerce and payments infrastructure.

Now Mastercard and BNP Paribas veteran House, previously chief commercial officer of the firm, has been appointed to lead it.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Allica has reported record financial results as the digital bank for established SMEs marked a third consecutive year of profit.

Underlying pre-tax profit in 2025 increased 34% to £43.7 million, even with £30m of strategic investment in new products and ‘go to market’.

Gross revenue rose 27% to £371.3m while its Active Business Reward Account customers grew 133% to over 14,000.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Wayve, a UK-based leader in AI for autonomous driving, has extended its Series D round with a $60 million investment from leading tech companies.

In February the firm announced it has raised $1.2 billion in Series D investment, with a potential further $300m from investor Uber to support the development of Wayve-powered ‘robotaxis’ on the Uber network.

Now Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Arm and Qualcomm Ventures have joined the investment round with the combined $60m injection.

HousingAI, a new AI knowledge platform built specifically for the social housing sector in England, has appointed Phil Shelton as chief executive ahead of its official launch in spring 2026.

Shelton brings more than two decades of experience in housing technology, having built and led software businesses focused on improving operational performance, compliance and decision-making within housing organisations.

Aryza, a Dublin-based provider of AI-enabled automation software across the credit & debt lifecycle, has acquired Umbrella Tech, a Toronto-based leader in voice-based agentic AI for financial services.

The acquisition significantly expands Aryza’s Agentic Collections & Recoveries intelligence, integrating human-like conversations into its existing conversational AI and digital collections platform, Aryza Engage.

This enables organisations globally to automate collections operations, customer service, and compliance journeys with speed and accuracy, 24/7, across 100+ languages.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The CEO has been ousted from the board of a cryptocurrency investment firm backed by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

Jai Patel has been replaced by David Galan at Stack BTC plc, which counts former short-lived Tory Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as its executive chair.

Paul Withers has also been appointed as chief strategy officer. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Standard Life plc has entered into an agreement to acquire insurance and pensions giant Aegon UK plc for £2 billion.

The pensions provider said the transaction will be funded through a combination of debt, cash and the issue of new ordinary shares in Standard Life.

The cash consideration will be £750m, financed through a combination of £650m debt issuance to be issued prior to completion and cash resources; while Aegon will be issued with 181.1m new shares, representing 15.3% of the group’s enlarged share capital.

The deal creates the UK’s largest retirement savings and income business, with 16 million customers and assets under administration of £480bn.