Author: Jonathan Symcox

NorthEdge has completed its ninth technology exit with the sale of Distology to Foresight Group.

The lower-mid-market investor first backed cybersecurity vendor Distology, led by Founder 250 star Hayley Roberts, in 2021.

It marked the Stockport firm’s first institutional capital raise.

Roberts recently appeared on our podcast The Naked Founder and was also a Northern Leader in 2025.

Pulsant, a UK data centre and digital infrastructure platform, has unveiled a £1m investment in its Birmingham data centre to support future demand for AI in the city.

Infrastructure upgrades to the 2,405m2 facility – acquired from Europe’s largest independent IT solutions and services provider Specialist Computer Centres PLC (SCC) last year – will support the surge in advanced computing.

The site, five miles southeast of the city centre, has been fully integrated into Pulsant’s UK-wide Edge infrastructure platform, which interconnects 14 regional data centres from Edinburgh to Fareham on the South Coast.

It provides local businesses with secure, high-speed infrastructure, alongside access to more than 1,600 technology providers, including international carriers.

The investment also includes upgraded security and a full refurbishment to improve the experience of people working in the data centre – both from Pulsant, and regional businesses who keep their own infrastructure on site.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

A Salford motion capture startup has been bought by Oxford Metrics plc.

Captive Devices was founded in 2024 by a trio of former Epic Games engineers – including Fred Isaac (pictured) – and received support from GM Business Growth Hub’s Innovation Service in securing innovation grants.

A developer of professional head-mounted camera systems and software, it enables markerless facial performance capture, used in visual effects, games and virtual production.

Oxford Metrics is a smart sensing and measurement technology group serving life sciences, entertainment, engineering and manufacturing markets.

The acquisition adds specialist facial capture to its platform Vicon, which has an established market leadership in body tracking.

 

The Government has launched the first public service procurement competitions under its £100 million Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme.

The scheme was announced by Chancellor John Healey at the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in North Carolina.

It seeks to back innovative British AI companies to develop solutions to some of the UK’s biggest challenges, from boosting NHS productivity and strengthening national security to improving cyber resilience and expanding the computing infrastructure that will power future growth. 

The Government has also established the AI Economics Institute, a world-first. This will seek to strengthen understanding of AI’s economic impacts, helping ensure policymakers have the evidence needed to maximise AI’s opportunities and respond to its challenges. 

The Chancellor has confirmed that the UK now plans to open up AIEI to international cooperation with G7 countries, focused on information and evidence sharing.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

FTSE 250 firm Gamma Communications is set to go private in a £1 billion deal.

London private equity house Epiris has agreed terms with the board of the technology firm, which will now seek shareholder approval for the takeover.

Gamma, led by CEO Andrew Belshaw, is a European business communications tech provider which employs more than 2,000 people.

Two other PE houses entered takeover discussions this summer but pulled out.

Gamma, whose core markets are the UK and Germany – with additional presence in Spain and the Benelux region – completed a restructuring last year to slash annual operating expenses by £7 million. 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Scan.com has closed $220 million (£162m) in combined equity and debt financing after doubling revenue over the past year to surpass a $165m (£122m) annualised run rate.

Valued at over $100 billion, the US medical imaging market is one of the largest segments of American healthcare. It is also slow, expensive, fragmented and still largely offline, with 85% of scans still booked via fax or phone. Patients often wait weeks for a scan, and a national shortage of radiologists and technologists adds further pressure on the system.

Scan.com’s data shows that the same MRI can cost a few hundred dollars at one centre and several thousand at another a few miles away, where price is a poor guide to quality. At the same time, it says, some centres are booked weeks out, while scanners nearby sit idle, and the marketing and administrative cost of filling them lands on patients too. 

The problem is not a shortage of machines. It is that nothing connects the patient to the right one at the right time.

Scan.com was founded as National MRI Scan in 2017 by clinicians Dr Khalid Latief and Jasper Nissim, alongside Charlie Bullock (CEO), Oliver Knight (COO), and Joe Daniels (head of front-end and UX).

Renalytix plc, a precision medicine diagnostics company focused on kidney disease, has announced a fundraise to support its new strategic collaboration with Quest Diagnostics.

The company intends to raise a minimum of approximately £9.5 million gross proceeds through a placing and subscription of new ordinary shares, including a retail offer.

The multi-year agreement with Quest will make kidneyintelX.dkd blood testing available to physicians and patients in the United States.

 

British businesses can now access the full benefits of the UK’s membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

The UK signed the CPTPP in 2023, and it entered into force in 2024 with the first countries that had ratified.

Canada is the final country to have ratified the UK’s accession, so from today businesses have access to all 11 CPTPP member countries, with economies worth almost £10 trillion in 2025.

The agreement is expected to deliver around £2 billion a year to the UK economy in the long run, the Government said.

The Athena Festival is calling for urgent action as the share of UK equity investment secured by all-female founder teams remains unchanged.

In October the festival will bring hundreds of founders, investors, funders and business leaders to Leeds to unlock more co-investment, strengthen regional funding networks and establish clearer routes to capital for female founders.

Following years of discussion and initiatives intended to address the gender funding gap, all-female founder teams received just 2% of UK equity investment in 2025, the same average share recorded across the past decade. 

This was despite a 35% increase in equity funding during the year as the market recovered. The figures underline a stark reality: the gender funding gap is not closing.

Organisers say that in an environment where the economy is stalling, and political upheaval has become commonplace, it is calling out to UK PLC to say that gender-led funding initiatives should not be seen as optional, but rather essential to unlocking the potential of female-founded businesses and driving £310 billion of additional UK economic growth.

Taking place at Nexus, Leeds, on Wednesday 7th October, the Athena Festival will bring together female founders and those with the capital, influence and decision-making power to turn awareness into measurable action.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

For Henry Dunne, the idea that would become Microneedle Solutions (MNS) started while he was studying at the University of Leeds. 

In March 2022, during his final year, he joined forces with co-founder Ian Bartenev to tackle one of healthcare’s oldest challenges: replacing syringe injections with a simpler, pain-free alternative.

Together they developed Miracus, a microprojection patch platform designed to deliver medicines and vaccines through the skin without the need for a traditional needle.

Leeds has been central to their journey. After receiving early support through the University of Leeds Spark programme, the company moved into Nexus, where access to specialist facilities, researchers and experienced mentors helped turn an idea developed by two students into a funded biotech business.

“What makes Leeds special is its combination of scale and accessibility,” says Dunne. “It is a major city with excellent universities, hospitals, businesses and infrastructure, but its innovation community remains connected enough that people genuinely know and support one another.”

That collaborative approach is helping to strengthen West Yorkshire’s reputation as a centre for health technology. The sector is championed by Leeds Digital Festival, which returns this September, and brings together businesses, researchers and entrepreneurs from the digital, engineering and life sciences sectors to share ideas, forge new partnerships and showcase innovation.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The CEO and co-founder of Atom Bank seems set to be replaced in the coming weeks.

Mark Mullen co-founded Atom as Britain’s first digital-only bank with Metro Bank founder Anthony Thomson in 2014. Thomson stepped down as chairman in 2018 and Mullen was featured on our Founder 250 list this year.

Following what it called ‘pre-IPO’ funding rounds in previous years, this summer the North East firm worked with advisers at Jefferies on a sale process which attracted interest from several private equity firms and at least two building societies.

It had hoped that the auction would value it between £600m and £1 billion, but no firm bids were received and it was abandoned in June.

Sky News reported that Mullen is expected to be replaced on an interim basis by Andrew Marshall, the company’s CFO. Now Atom has responded to those reports.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

System1 Group plc has rejected another £43.1 million takeover bid from fellow listed firm Brave Bison.

The board of the marketing effectiveness research company, founded 25 years ago, said it had rejected the third offer from Brave Bison, which is its largest shareholder.

The first approach from Brave Bison, parent company of SocialChain, was an all-share affair, while the second contained a cash component. The third increased the cash component but not the value of the offer.

This week Brave Bison reported a doubling of revenue and adjusted EBITDA in its latest half-year results – to £23.9m and £4.5m respectively.

For the six months ending 30th June 2026, it also grew adjusted profit before tax to £4.1m from £1.9m.

Data relating to 8.7 million people was exposed in a cyber attack on Manchester Airports Group on Thursday.

The group said email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations and postcodes of customers at Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports had been compromised.

MAG said the incident had not resulted in any operational disruption and that neither it nor the system accessed hold customers’ bank or payment details. 

A new flexible subscription model from Protein Works aims to help busy consumers stay consistent with their nutrition.

‘On Tap’ is a service designed to make it easier for customers to incorporate nutrition products into their everyday routines.

Subscribers can set up regular deliveries for products such as the Diet Meal 360 range, Whey Protein 360 range, Complete Meal 360 range, Savoury SuperMeals, Mushroom Coffee drink and ‘All In’ A.I Greens.

The launch comes during a strong period of growth for Protein Works, which generated £55.1m of annual revenue for the 12 months to August 31st 2025 and was recently acquired by world-leading dairy company Lactalis.

There is a battle between major UK fund managers to run a new £1 billion fund backing homegrown entrepreneurs.

Last month Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced the UK Scale-up Fund – a first-of-its-kind vehicle dedicated to investing in scaling UK science and technology businesses – backed by a consortium of some of the country’s largest pension providers and supported by the British Business Bank as well as the Government’s Office for Investment.

Sky News reports that M&G Investments and Schroders are among the firms which have applied to manage the fund.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

eEnergy has made interim boss John Gahan its permanent CEO following a ‘turbulent’ summer.

Following the departure of Harvey Sinclair at the end of May – and a change of chair – then-CFO Gahan was appointed interim CEO of the firm, listed on London’s junior AIM market.

He reviewed the company’s sales pipeline and, concluding that this was materially overestimated, issued a sharp downgrade to its full-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA expectations – from £38 million to £32m, and £4.5m to £1.7m, respectively.

He also launched a major restructuring programme to reduce operating costs from £6.3m to around £2m.

Love2shop, the UK’s market-leading multi-brand gift card retailer, has today announced a new strategic partnership with group payments pioneer Collctiv to launch its latest venture, Love2save.

Love2save is a brand new savings platform designed to simplify how UK consumers individually save money or pool money for shared collections. The platform empowers individuals or groups, whether friends & family or colleagues in the office, to seamlessly collect money together for important  milestones.

Once savings goals are achieved, funds can be instantly loaded onto a Love2shop Digital gift card or Love2shop Holidays gift card, and then redeemed across an extensive network of household brands, including Tui, Jet2holidays, Currys, Marks & Spencer and many others.

Powering this new venture is Collctiv’s unique group payments technology. Since launching in 2019, Collctiv – a regular star of our FinTech 50 ranking – has become the UK’s leading group payments platform, handling over £130 million in payments volume and serving more than 2.3m users across 175 countries.

Major changes are coming to Facebook and Instagram after Meta settled a high-profile trial in the United States.

The social media giant agreed to pay an $17 billion settlement to 29 US states which had brought a lawsuit accusing it of deliberately designing addictive products which led to mental health issues among young people – including anxiety, depression and suicide. It will also pay $1bn to Texas, which was not part of the lawsuit.

Led by California, the states also claimed that Meta regularly collected data on children under the age of 13 without parental permission, a violation of federal and state laws. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been due to appear as a witness in the jury trial – which began last week – while Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri was questioned.

The company denies wrongdoing but agreed to pay $17bn, to be divided among the 29 states, over the next 10 years.

Crucially, it also agreed to make significant changes to improve safeguarding on its Instagram and Facebook apps in ‘participating US states’. While the changes will not automatically be coming to the UK, the Government here said it is “following developments closely”.

North East technology leaders are calling for closer engagement with public sector commissioners and greater opportunities to test new technologies, following discussions about how procurement can better support regional businesses, innovation and social value.

The findings are published in Dynamo North East’s new Reimagining Procurement and Social Value report, which brings together feedback from a Leadership Forum involving stakeholders from across the region’s technology, public, private and voluntary sectors.

The report sets out three recommendations:

• Strengthen engagement between commissioners and the regional technology sector

• Support the testing and adoption of technology-led innovation

• Strengthen the evidence base for procurement and social value

Businesses across Greater Manchester will continue to benefit from tailored workforce development support after the Employer Engagement for Essential Work Skills (EEEWS) contract was extended until June 2027.

The extension will enable GM Business Growth Hub to continue delivering the programme beyond its initial term, helping more employers identify skills gaps, access training opportunities and invest in workforce development. The programme forms part of GM Business Growth Hub’s wider commitment to supporting business growth through skills development and workforce resilience.

Delivered by GM Business Growth Hub, the programme helps employers and individuals access training that supports productivity, career development and long-term economic growth. A team of specialist Skills Development Specialists work closely with employers to understand workforce challenges, identify opportunities for development and connect businesses with suitable training providers.

Since launching in late 2024, the programme has supported hundreds of businesses and individuals across Greater Manchester. A total of 605 organisations have recommended training and skills development opportunities, with 95% of organisations progressing into training. More than 3,900 individuals have been referred to training providers, with over 1,000 people already starting training courses.