Author: Jonathan Symcox

eEnergy Group plc is seeking emergency funding following a ‘turbulent’ summer.

The company’s board has decided that it must source new capital to refinance the business, enable it to pay overdue creditors and ‘take advantage of the many opportunities which exist in its markets’.

It said: “The ongoing delays in receiving the Mace cash have severely impacted eEnergy’s ability to pay creditors as they fall due and are adversely impacting the company’s ability to source materials and services to continue current installations effectively.”

In connection with the proposed fundraising, the company has entered a Capital Access Window – a mechanism introduced recently in the updated AIM rules for companies.  

This is a voluntary pause to the trading of a company’s shares to make it easier for companies to reach a broader range of investors during a fundraise. During the window, the company and its advisers will seek to determine the level of investor demand and the appropriate size of the proposed fundraising.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

FinTech Zilch is reportedly preparing for a £1.5 billion London IPO – and it could list as early as next year.

The Financial Times, citing insiders familiar with the firm’s plans, claims that the consumer payments platform is lining up investment banks for a potential blockbuster listing.

They said that this month Zilch invited banks to pitch for roles on its planned flotation, although discussions remain in the early stages and may not come to fruition.

Should Europe’s fastest-growing unicorn opt for an IPO in its home city, it would be a huge boost to the London Stock Exchange after several take-private deals were announced.

A further blow to the LSE emerged over the weekend when another long-anticipated listing candidate, neobank Monzo, was reported to have entered discussions with Brazilian giant Nubank’s over a sale – as well as minority stake talks with private equity houses.

Regulators have provisionally green-lit the takeover of Southern Co-operative by the Co-operative Group.

The Competition and Markets Authority said earlier this month that the deal, agreed in April, could ‌reduce competition in some markets following a phase 1 investigation.

Now the CMA has proposed to accept a remedies package since offered by the Co-Op Group to address these competition concerns.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Stricken AdTech Mirriad may yet be saved despite spending five months in administration.

The listed virtual in-content advertising technology company, founded in 2015, failed to secure emergency funding early this summer while a US joint venture has failed to perform.

As a result, it did not publish its annual report and accounts for the year ended 31st December 2025; and this morning it confirmed that it would not publish results for the six months ended 30th June 2026.

However there could be light at the end of the tunnel as it revealed that it is currently in discussions with a third party regarding the terms of a possible investment in the company.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shareholders have approved Pinewood Technologies Group PLC’s £545 million sale to San Francisco private equity firm Ridgeview Partners.

The FTSE 250 firm is a Birmingham-headquartered tech provider to car dealerships and was formed out of the breakup of dealer group Pendragon. It is led by Florida-based Bill Berman.

The acquisition remains subject to the sanction of the UK High Court at a hearing which will be held on 7th October 2026. It is expected to become effective shortly thereafter.

Back in February its shares nosedived from around £4.50 to below £3 after a £575m takeover by another US-based PE house Apax Partners fell through.

Pinewood posted results this morning for the six months ended 30th June 2026.

Tech giant Figma has opened an expanded London office.

The platform, described as a ‘collaborative canvas for design, code, and AI’, is deepening its investment in one of its largest markets outside the United States. It says two-thirds of the FTSE 100 index use its platfom.

The office gives new life to restored Georgian and Victorian warehouses at Elder Yard on Norton Folgate, a part of the city that has been home to makers for hundreds of years.

“The UK has one of the deepest concentrations of design and product talent anywhere, from the banks and retailers building new digital products to the design studios shaping the future of online interaction,” said Daniel Barrett, Figma’s SVP of international. “We’re proud to expand our office in the heart of this incredible creative ecosystem.”

Vivify has strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of a key figure from JustGiving.

The Manchester company has appointed Mathew Lloyd as director of product. As a senior product manager at JustGiving, he helped shape digital products used by millions of people to support charities and causes around the world. 

Vivify helps schools and academy trusts to unlock the full value of their facilities through technology while making it easier for local communities to access sport and physical activity.

Founded in 2020 and backed by Arete and the William Currie Group, the company featured in third spot on this year’s EdTech 50 ranking.

 

Liverpool-founded sportswear brand Montirex has delivered another year of impressive growth, reporting turnover of £129.3 million for the year ending 31st December 2025.

The performance represents a 79% increase on the previous year (£72.3m). Profit before tax was £34.5m, up from £19.6m the previous year.

The firm said growth was driven by strong demand across consumer and wholesale channels, increasing sales across European markets and the continued expansion of its product offering. 

Founded by friends Daniel Yuen and Kieran Riddell-Austin in 2019, Montirex has built a loyal customer following by focusing on technical performance, product quality and accessible pricing. They featured on our inaugural Founder 250 list this year.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Nubank dropped 10% today as investors were seemingly spooked by reports of a potential £10 billion swoop for UK counterpart Monzo.

Reports at the weekend claimed that Monzo is in talks over a sale of both its entire business – to Nubank, Latin America’s largest FinTech – and a minority stake to private equity, with a third less likely option being a further traditional equity fundraise.

However the potential cash-and-shares takeover offer from Nubank – worth between £8-10bn – does not seem to have gone down well with investors in the Brazil-headquartered firm.

Anthropic has warned that AI could ‘threaten humanity’ ahead of its $2 trillion IPO.

The Claude maker produced a 261-page prospectus before an expected launch on the public markets.

An astonishing 80 pages of the document were devoted to risk factors, with Anthropic saying advanced models could display self-preserving behaviour – including resisting shutdown, concealing or manipulating information and behaviour resembling blackmail.

Oxford Science Enterprises, the venture builder backing University of Oxford spinouts, has appointed Dr Jeffrey Moore as new senior partner and head of life sciences.

A scientist by training with a DPhil from Oxford, Dr Moore brings over two decades of BioTech venture capital leadership across North America and Europe.

Dr Moore joins OSE from Boston-based MP Healthcare Venture Management, where he served as president. He has a track record of backing early-stage university spinouts ahead of formal fundraising rounds, including investments in Covagen (acquired by Johnson & Johnson) and Trimtech Therapeutics, which completed a £36m fundraise in June 2026.

52North, the University of Cambridge spin-out behind the Aster biomarker platform, has secured £3.2 million in new funding to accelerate its mission to help transform urgent cancer care and bring its core product, Neutrocheck, to market.

Neutrocheck is a rapid finger-prick blood test that allows for the remote triaging of chemotherapy patients who may be at risk of neutropenic sepsis, a life-threatening complication which currently drives tens of thousands of emergency hospital visits each year – even though research suggests that around two in five of these visits could be ‘false alarms’.

The round is co-led by Macmillan Ventures, the newly launched venture investment arm of Macmillan Cancer Support, and Hargreave Hale AIM VCT, alongside existing investors including Cedars Sinai Intellectual Property Company, Cancer Research Horizons, the University of Cambridge and OKG Capital.

The round also includes a grant from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme, which combines grant funding with private investment to help innovative UK companies accelerate commercialisation and growth.

Sci-Tech Daresbury has announced that The University of Manchester has joined its Gold Partner Programme, strengthening the support available to science, technology and innovation businesses across the campus and wider innovation network.

The University joins long-standing partner The University of Liverpool alongside a network of specialist organisations providing expertise across technology commercialisation, finance, insurance, marketing, intellectual property and legal services.

The move gives Sci-Tech Daresbury companies even greater access to academic expertise, collaborative research opportunities, innovation support, and student and graduate talent from two of the North West’s leading Russell Group universities.

OpenAI has scrapped the launch of its next ChatGPT model after safety testing raised concerns about the AI acting beyond users’ instructions. 

The news comes as the UK’s AI Security Institute finds that GPT-6 Astra conducted a vastly increased number of unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in a simulated evaluation, compared with previous OpenAI models.

The new model was supposed to debut this month inside ChatGPT and Codex, but it reportedly showed higher levels of deception than its predecessors during internal testing. 

DriveSimple, a commercial vehicle subscription business, has raised £1.5 million in new funding, bringing the company’s total capital raised to £4.5m.

The latest funding round is led by Calm Media Investments, with continued support from DriveSimple’s existing shareholders.

The company has also appointed Andrea Romano as CEO as it prepares to accelerate its growth across the UK.

Romano is the former COO of grocery marketplace Lola Market, which was acquired by Delivery Hero.

DriveSimple provides new vans to tradespeople, delivery operators and SMEs through a flexible subscription model designed to sit between traditional leasing and vehicle ownership. Customers commit for a minimum of six months, with a three-month break clause, giving businesses the ability to adjust their vehicle requirements as their workloads change.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

The biggest shareholder in Sheffield tech firm Tribal Group PLC is considering a takeover bid which would gazump a private equity offer set for a shareholder vote on Friday.

Tribal, led by CEO Mark Pickett, provides student information systems and digital platforms used by educational institutions and other organisations.

Yesterday shares in Tribal jumped 17% to 98p after Main Capital Partners increased its proposed cash offer to £231.2 million.

Under the terms of the revised offer, shareholders would receive 105p per share, compared with a total consideration of approximately £189.3m under the previous proposal.

Tribal’s board unanimously maintained its recommendation that shareholders vote in favour of the transaction at a general meeting scheduled for Friday.

However this morning Jenzabar, Inc, a higher education technology provider based in Boston, Massachusetts – which owns 26% of Tribal’s share capital – called for the vote to be adjourned and said it was considering tabling a cash bid of its own.

Insurance giant Aviva has extended its FinTech partnership with Founders Factory, the global venture studio and accelerator.

Aviva is investing over three years to build new startups focusing on insurance, wealth, property, asset management and cybersecurity. The new ventures will look to harness AI and frontier technologies to deliver new ways in how people manage and protect their money, health and family.

The decade-long strategic partnership has supported more than 60 startups to date, which have raised more than £500 million in investment since 2016.

These include Tembo, a mortgage lending platform that recently saw Aviva expand access through its workplace pension proposition following a successful pilot; and Marrow, a connecter of AI agents including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to insurers’ pricing, underwriting and policy admin systems.

Manchester AI firm PEAK AIO has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Nasdaq-listed US giant NetApp.

PEAK AIO was founded in Manchester by Mark Klarzynski and was designed to address some of the industry’s most demanding data-intensive computing challenges. 

The company’s core innovation, a next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file system, was developed to solve one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the AI era: enabling shared storage to scale alongside the GPU clusters that power modern AI workloads.

The deal, for an undisclosed amount, is subject to customary completion conditions, including regulatory approvals.

Investor Pembroke VCT plc, a London-listed venture capital trust, said it would generate a significant return for shareholders.

 

UK healthcare AI company DYAD has raised $10 million (£7.5m) to accelerate its expansion across the NHS and into new markets.

The Series A, led by Sangha Capital with participation from existing investors closed in April 2026, and was backed by a syndicate of technology investors including Bill Tai and Carbide Ventures.

DYAD is targeting one of healthcare’s biggest coordination challenges: longform unstructured data that requires human effort to both create and decode. 

Its primary care product BetterLetter services over 200 practices and focuses on the £300m annual burden of unstructured data transfer between secondary care and primary care.

A St Helens MedTech scaleup specialising in simulation training technology for surgeons has extended its capital raised to $20 million (£15m).

Inovus Medical partners with leading organisations such as the NHS, the Royal College of Surgeons England, and the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists (AAGL) to deliver standardised surgical training to residents and surgeons in the UK and North America.

The company provides surgeons with lifelike models of human anatomy made from advanced ‘hydrogel’ materials. Its simulators are powered by its software platform, TOTUM, which allows surgeons to track their training and receive feedback from mentors online.

The funding will support the launch of new technologies focussed on flexible endoscopy, robotic surgery and advanced tissues that replace the need for training on pigs and cadavers. The funding will also support the introduction of the existing and expanded portfolio to new international territories with a focus on the rapidly expanding Middle Eastern and Asian markets.