Bite-size news and insight from UK business and tech – including funding, deals and appointments
Published: May 14, 2026 at 9:34 am
Future plc has reported a startling drop in profits in its half-year results as revenue also fell.
The Bath-headquartered media firm said for the six months ended 31st March 2026, group revenue was £349.1 million, down 8% on the corresponding period a year earlier.
Profit before tax dropped 67% from £56.6m to £18.4m.
The FTSE-listed owner of titles spanning tech, gaming, homes and lifestyle – which owns TechRadar – promoted former CTO Kevin Li Ying (pictured) to the top job in March 2025 months after CEO Jon Steinberg said he would leave the role.
Later in the year, chair Richard Huntingford announced that he would step down after the annual general meeting in February 2026, ending an eight-year stint leading the board.
In January it announced that it had acquired women’s fashion and lifestyle publisher SheerLuxe Ltd and BLUSH Talent MGMT in a £39.9m deal.
Published: May 14, 2026 at 9:07 am
A UK company aiming to build a chip to deliver exponential performance improvements for AI models has raised £160 million funding.
Fractile, which in 2024 exited stealth with £12m in seed funding, was founded in 2022 by artificial intelligence PhD Walter Goodwin.
It has developed a radically different approach to the design of chips for AI inference that it claims can deliver transformational improvements in performance for frontier AI models in deployment.
Published: May 14, 2026 at 8:47 am
A London AI firm has emerged from stealth with a mammoth £480 million funding round which values it around £3.5 billion.
Recursive Superintelligence, founded in 2025, is a team of former research leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Salesforce AI and Uber AI.
The secretive company, which has no associated members on LinkedIn, confirmed the funding deal on the social media platform. It said the round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and Greycroft, with major participation from AMD Ventures and NVIDIA.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 1:16 pm
Palatine-backed fulfilmentcrowd, a tech-led global fulfilment provider, has acquired Fulfilment.nl, a high-growth Dutch eCommerce logistics specialist.
The deal accelerates the group’s expansion in the fast-growing EU omnichannel eCommerce market.
The transaction is expected to enhance margins through economies of scale, cost synergies and shared technology. The combined network will span seven fulfilment centres across the EU, increasing capacity and operational efficiency.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 1:10 pm
Procentia, a provider of pension administration software and technology, has announced the appointment of Jen Tippin as group CEO.
Tippin will join Procentia at the beginning of September, succeeding Liam McGrath, who is stepping down at the end of June.
She most recently worked at NatWest Group as group COO, delivering major strategic change, strengthening customer focus and championing innovation across the bank.
Tippin has also held a number of senior roles at Lloyds Banking Group, including group director, people and productivity.
She brings strong governance experience through her roles on the boards of Morgan Sindall and HMRC.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 12:57 pm
A San Francisco FinTech has swooped for London-based AI firm Rossum.
Coupa, a platform for autonomous spend management, has acquired Rossum, behind intelligent document processing solutions.
Rossum, founded by three university AI dropouts from Prague, raised £72 million in 2021.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 12:41 pm
A listed investor in THG and NCC Group is to raise funds for new investment opportunities.
Kelso, listed on the main market of the London Stock Exchange, holds stakes in publicly traded companies and has previously raised four tranches of investment.
It intends to raise fresh funds equal to 5% of its issued share capital at a placing price of 3 pence per share, equivalent to £650,000.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 11:51 am
I sold my first company, Pariti, to Tandem Bank almost eight years ago now.
It was a small exit, never publicly announced in terms of numbers.
I took home enough to buy a house, not enough to never work again.
And I think that’s actually the reality for most founders who go through an exit.
The press writes it up as consolidation, as strategy, as success, but for me, the feelings were genuinely mixed.
There was pride. We’d done remarkable things with a tiny team. We secured direct FCA authorisation, built a B2B partnership with HSBC, and created a product people actually used.
But there was also a real sense of loss. Pariti was my baby, and suddenly it wasn’t mine anymore.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 9:16 am
Pioneer Point Partners , a private equity firm focused on sustainable infrastructure, has taken a majority stake in Rendesco.
The transaction represents the fifth investment by Pioneer’s second institutional fund, Pioneer Infrastructure Partners II, which reached final close in April 2025.
Pioneer has committed up to £100 million to Rendesco, with the Fund’s initial investment being used to acquire a majority stake in the business and support the delivery of its existing and future pipeline.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 9:02 am
A partnership that aims to put the UK at the forefront of self-driving vehicle technology has been signed by the Government with Wayve.
Wayve, founded in Cambridge and now based in London, recently revealed fresh funding of potentially more than $1.5 billion, which valued the company at $9bn.
It has been backed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Arm, Qualcomm Ventures, Eclipse, Balderton, SoftBank, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis.
Now it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government to deepen collaboration on next‑generation self‑driving technologies and back the scaleup.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 9:00 am
AskEd has raised £100,000 pre-seed funding at a £2m valuation from angel investors and launched its voice AI platform for university and college student recruitment.
The company was founded by Stefan Parker, who spent 15 years in higher education student recruitment, and John Crick, who has over two decades of international student recruitment experience.
Parker developed the initial concept following his redundancy last October and tested an early prototype with students at Middlesex University before approaching Crick.
AskEd’s platform handles student enquiries by voice in real time, in over 70 languages, around the clock. It draws on each institution’s own verified content to answer questions accurately, qualifies leads and integrates with existing CRM systems. The basic deployment requires one line of code, the EdTech firm says.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 8:30 am
Ofgem and Innovate UK have today announced the launch of a £500 million energy fund.
Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund opens for applications on 26th May and aims to attract projects that focus on upgrading the energy network – bringing them to trial or launch. Delivered in partnership with Innovate UK, the SIF is funded by Ofgem.
Five innovation challenges, recommended by the Energy Networks Innovation Taskforce and endorsed by Ofgem, set out the core priorities for the coming five-year RIIO-3 price control period.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 8:15 am
The Payments Association, a trade body representing over 250 member organisations in the financial services sector, has appointed Emma Banymandhub as CEO.
Banymandhub previously served as the association’s COO during a time which saw it triple its headcount.
This comes as the trade body sets its sights on international expansion, having established itself as a UK-centric payments powerhouse during its 18-year history.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 8:09 am
A gaming tech startup has raised £5.1 million to build user acquisition AI agents for mobile game studios and the consumer market.
The Series A round into London-based Kohort was led by The Raine Group, which invested seed capital in 2025 and has a commercial relationship with the firm.
Kohort has built a predictive analytics platform which helps mobile game studios, operators, finance teams and investors optimise user acquisition spend and perform M&A due diligence.
Published: May 13, 2026 at 7:56 am
itim Group plc, behind tech enabling store-based retailers to optimise their businesses, swung into the red in 2025 as revenues dipped.
For the year ended 31st December 2025, group revenue decreased by 2% to £17.5m. However recurring revenue now represents 77% of this after this increased 9% to £14.2m.
Group adjusted EBITDA was £1.7m (FY24: £2.5m), while loss before tax was £500,000 compared to a profit of £200,000 in FY24.
Published: May 12, 2026 at 5:53 pm
The 51% Club, a definitive community for ambitious female founders and leaders, is marking its second birthday with the announcement of its most significant milestone to date – the launch of a dedicated co-working space for female founders and leaders in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.
Opening on 1st June 2026, The 51% Club at The Wilmot will be housed within The Wilmot, one of Birmingham’s most beautifully restored heritage buildings. The space will offer dedicated desks and flexible passes exclusively for women building and scaling their businesses, and its announcement comes at a time when only 2-4% of women-led businesses in the UK reach £1 million in revenue.
The launch marks a defining moment for The 51% Club, which has grown from a series of Birmingham events to a national movement with five city hubs located in Birmingham, Leamington Spa, Leicester, London and Worcester.
Published: May 12, 2026 at 5:13 pm
Isomorphic Labs, an AI-first drug design and development company founded by DeepMind founder Sir Demis Hassabis, has raised £1.6 billion in Series B funding.
The latest round of investment will accelerate the UK company’s evolution from pioneering novel AI models to applying them at scale.
The financing round is led by Thrive Capital, and includes participation from existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, significantly expanding Isomorphic Labs’ global capital base.
Published: May 12, 2026 at 4:25 pm
A failed neobank based in Manchester has re-emerged as a profitable FinTech infrastructure provider.
In 2024 Frost, which combined digital banking with energy-switching tools, closed all retail customer accounts after five years of operation.
Despite attracting more than 18,000 users and processing tens of millions of pounds in transaction volume, changes in the market forced the business to rethink its future.
At the time, founder Paweł Ołtuszyk told BusinessCloud that it would instead provide its core banking technology and customisable mobile app to other financial institutions in a B2B pivot, and that its staff of 10 would remain in place.
Now the full reinvention of the company into Keel – a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform shaped by first-hand operating experience – has been revealed.
Published: May 12, 2026 at 4:07 pm
It’s easy to look at all CEOs and think that they are all faced with the same pressures and challenges.
But the truth is that when you’re running a business you founded, something you have built from the ground up, you will have had a very different kind of journey from someone leading an established company.
As the business evolves, so does your role. Get ready for change.
In my early days as a business owner, I was much more hands on, with multiple roles and spinning a thousand plates.
What needed doing got done, often by me. Now my role is more about guiding the business and supporting teams.
It can feel like you’re further removed from the reason you founded the business as you move from a start-up to an established business, but that’s a sign of success.
Published: May 12, 2026 at 3:56 pm
Shares in Vodafone fell 8% today despite reporting total revenue growth of 8% in FY26 to €40.5 billion.
The telecoms giant expects to see profit before tax of almost £1.9bn, compared to a £1.5bn loss in FY25, as it simplifies its business.
It also recently announced plans to take full ownership of VodafoneThree after agreeing a £4.3bn deal to buy the 49% stake it does not already own. That deal is set to complete in the second half of 2026.
However investor sentiment was dampened by the decision to pause share buybacks to prioritise taking full control of the joint venture; disappointing results in Germany, its largest market; and missing its overall adjusted earnings forecast.
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