Author: Jonathan Symcox

Synap was making waves in the Leeds tech scene as far back as 2018 with its revision platform for students.

Fast-forward eight years and two pivots and the EdTech 50 star now provides technology for administering exams as well as supporting students with their work.

Speaking to Founder Friday on top of Bruntwood SciTech’s Platform building, Dr James Gupta – who co-founded the platform to help with his medical studies in Leeds – explains why the West Yorkshire city is a great place to start a business.

With universities – including Ivy League institutions – employers and regulated sectors using the platform, as well as private EdTech and tutoring companies, he says the creative and agile startup transforms into a military-style operation on exam day – which is a “nice mix”.

“I wouldn’t change it for the world,” he says.

The EDM (electronic dance music) and Metallica fan also tells us how he likes to unwind when not working on the business – he and his wife spent two weeks at music festivals last year!

Author: Tim Follett, founder & CEO, StructureFlow

Before founding StructureFlow, I spent eight years as a corporate lawyer at Slaughter and May and Farrer & Co, advising on highly complex, high-stakes transactions. 

These were multi-billion-pound deals involving layers of entities across multiple jurisdictions, with ownership, control and risk constantly shifting as negotiations evolved.

To manage that complexity, we relied on structure charts, timelines and diagrams. They were essential. They imposed order on something that would otherwise be overwhelming. But they were also static and slow to build. Worse, every time a deal changed, someone had to rebuild the picture.

Documents and diagrams made things readable, but not truly navigable. They flattened dynamic relationships into snapshots. As structures evolved, those snapshots quickly became outdated.

That’s where risk crept in. Not because anyone was careless, but because the tools weren’t built for constantly shifting complexity.

Author: Rebecca Fox, founder, Relentica

I’m a leader who cares deeply about people and commercial outcomes.

Sometimes those two things feel in conflict. Leadership is hard. It can be lonely. You have to make difficult decisions grounded in commercial, environmental, political and emotional reality.

I’m far from perfect, but what drives me is making the best decision available with the information in front of me – and helping others do the same.

I’ve always been technically minded. I could code at eight, thanks to having a Dad who was a computer science teacher. 

But technology doesn’t teach you leadership. That came later – through mistakes, hard lessons, hard work, and learning how to align people around outcomes.

GTSE co-founder and eCommerce director Tom Armenante doesn’t pretend the last few months have been calm.

Having recently moved his family from Leeds to Manchester just before Christmas, he describes life as “very busy” – not least because he’s balancing the demands of scaling a fast-growing eCommerce business with family life.

“I’ve got a little one-year-old baby and a four-year-old,” he told us recently. “Life is chaotic.”

But that’s very much in keeping with GTSE’s story – a business built on momentum, constant iteration and a drive to make buying trade consumables easier for customers.

Shares in a London-based tissue engineering firm have dropped by a third in the first hour of trading this morning after a 15 million funding deal fell through.

BSF Enterprise PLC’s subsidiaries include lab-grown leather, corneal repair and cell-culture media supplements – the latter a spinout from Newcastle University. It also has operations in Hong Kong.

The proposed £15m equity raise, backed by Blackstone Mercantile Group, was to accelerate commercialisation plans.

CrawlJobs, a global job aggregation platform focused on indexing vacancies directly from employer career pages, has completed its first external funding round at £2.2 million.

The new capital will support the continued expansion of the company’s AI-powered crawling infrastructure and help accelerate the commercial rollout of new products being developed within the wider group.

Founded in London in 2024, CrawlJobs was built to address a major structural weakness in online job discovery. While many candidates rely on traditional job boards, a large number of openings are published only on company career sites, regional recruitment pages, or localised hiring portals.

CrawlJobs is designed to capture those opportunities closer to the source, giving job seekers broader and more up-to-date visibility into the market.

Instead of depending solely on employer submissions or third-party reposting, the platform uses AIdriven crawling technology to continuously detect and structure vacancies from company websites. This enables faster discovery of openings that may otherwise remain fragmented, delayed, or difficult to find through conventional channels.

The UK economy failed to grow in January, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The performance is bad news for the government as it covers a period before the Middle East conflict started.

The zero growth was weaker than had been predicted, and followed growth of just 0.1 per cent in December and 0.2 per cent in November.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warned this week that the longer the conflict lasts in the Middle East, the more likely it is that there will be an effect on the UK economy.

EnSilica plc, a fabless, application-specific chipmaker, has raised approximately £9.7 million through a placing and subscription of new ordinary shares

The Abingdon firm has also launched an offer to retail investors via the BookBuild Platform which aims to raise up to £300,000.

The first tranche of the placing of approximately £4.54m is expected to complete next week, with the second tranche of approximately £5.16m expected to complete on or around 8th April 2026.

Author: Chris Maguire

InsurTech Loxa has successfully closed its £2.7m seed round, completed across three tranches.

The round was backed primarily by angels and family offices, including the Lazaroo-Hood Group, with introductions facilitated by Angel Investment Network, FundMyPitch, and the Entrepreneur’s Collective.

Capital will be deployed to drive EU expansion, scale Loxa’s retail network to 150 live partners, and broaden the platform to support every insurable product category.

Jamie Hamer, co-founder and CEO of Loxa, said: “We started Loxa because we believed embedded product protection should be as universal as the checkout itself, available to every retailer, for every customer, everywhere.

“We made a deliberate choice to build this round with angels and operators who shared our mission and backed our vision from the start, and that alignment builds better businesses.

“Closing this round means we can now  deliver on that promise at scale, with the right people and resources to execute successfully.”

Loxaʼs technology connects natively to over 70% of UK ecommerce infrastructure via apps for Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and BigCommerce, as well as direct API integrations.

Loxa enables retailers to go live in as little as 48 hours.

Thanks for joining us.

Dragons’ Den will return later in the year.

Jenna also can’t see the bigger vision but wants to help her. She is out but will help her to get in front of Selfridges etc.

Touker says Rachel is investable, but the product is not.

He would like to tap into her knowledge and is willing to give her the money for 35% of the business.

She says she will need multiple rounds to take the brand to where she wants it to go and so 35% is too high.

He says that if he gets his money back within 12-18 months, he will go down to 25%.

She asks whether he will go down to 20%. He counter-offers 30%, dropping to 25% when he gets his money back.

She agrees! “Great great great great… we’re going to be kings of this thing!” he says.

He tells the other Dragons: “I’m investing in her as an entrepreneur.”

Jenna, who is obviously a makeup entrepreneur, says it’s a crowded market. Rachel says the products will be targeted at conditions, age etc.

Steven asks why the revenue has been stagnant at £140k in each of the first three years.

Rachel hasn’t had the time to invest in sales and marketing, and has invested in infrastructure first.

Steven says the growth profile is more important and that her decision is an “amber flag” and is out.

Peter agrees and says he can’t see the opportunity in the business.

Deborah says she is out as it’s a competitive space.

Each of the previous three years has seen Albus & Flora generate a profit of £15-30k.

The profits have fallen each year – but that is due to investment in the business.

“Is this a health product or a beauty product?” asks Steven.

Rachel says UV damage can be accumulated throughout your lifetime.

Peter says his lips feel tingly and like they’re growing. It’s a plumper!

Touker owns a trademark lipstick and is about to go live with it.

 

Lancashire lass Rachel has a background in pharmacology and spent over a decade researching how the body and skin respond to stress, exercise and environmental exposure.

She had the “privilege” – her words on her website – of supporting Team GB across three Olympic and Paralympic Games.

She is selling into aesthetic clinics, spas and beauty salons and has generated £695k turnover to date.

She is looking for £50k for 15% of the business.

Last to pitch is physiologist Rachel Williams, founder of a skincare brand which seeks to protect lips and the skin around the mouth from sun damage.

Launched in 2022, Albus & Flora’s £18 lip shield is an SPF 30 lip balm that includes peptides, nourishing oils and botanical extracts to keep lips soft and hydrated. It comes in a natural colour and three others.

Its other product is a treatment mask which exfoliates and plumps lips and costs £30.

Deborah says he needs an investor but can’t see how she can invest the time he needs.

Touker is also out in typically abrupt style.

Jenna thinks he’s great… and sees something in “this chicken play”…

“I’d love to help you, but I’m out.”

Fred says there are a lot of opportunities – searching for a turkey at Christmas, or a bunny at Easter.

He plans to do it himself for now, which could be limiting.

She tells Jenna that many users come back for another game, and sometime several.

Steven asks: “What am I investing in here? A platform to scale? Because that’s what I would be interested in.”

Fred says his original pitch was about combating the loneliness epidemic, but he changed tack. Steven would have preferred that.

Peter says that this isn’t the business though – that is chasing a chicken around a city. He’s out.

Steven is also out. He found the pitch distracting.

Fred says too many developers don’t look to the “other side” to see how the tech they have developed is received in the real world.

A solo game is charged at £15 per person and he says people play to meet other people and find love.

He wants to grow it to 100 games per day, which would be £30k revenue.

The Dragons seem impressed so far.

Fred is wearing a chicken costume – “I’m going to be a roasted chicken in there” he quips.

A ridiculous intro where he dashes about the studio trying to dodge two characters from Team A and Team B has the Dragons laughing.

He turned over £55k in year one and is forecasting £164k in year two – with no full-time staff.

He built all the tech himself and says it is “scalable – it can pop up in any city tomorrow”.

He is looking for £50k for 10% of the business.