Sedulo Group, one of the UK’s fastest-growing business advisory firms, has announced the appointment of Liz Chapman as its new chief marketing officer, based in the Manchester office.

Chapman brings over 24 years of strategic leadership from the UK’s top media agencies, most recently in a senior role at Carat UK. She has helped to shape the voice and growth of some of Britain’s most recognisable consumer brands, including Virgin, Greggs, Holland & Barrett, and Co-op.

Her arrival is the latest in a leadership recruitment drive across the UK from Sedulo – who are closing in on £25m of turnover in 2025 – following the appointments of Ross Preston as head of audit and Ben Vaux as corporate tax director in Leeds, and Simon O’Brien as managing partner in Birmingham.

Grateful has raised £1.5 million seed funding from Calculus Capital.

The Harrogate- and London-based cashless tipping platform was founded in 2022 by Mason Potter (CEO), Jarrod Potter (chair) and Damian Guy (CPTO) after their experience in the United States, where they saw first-hand how well-managed tipping could profoundly boost team motivation and performance.

They found that operators were drowning in admin – operating on huge, complex Excel sheets for tip pooling – whilst service workers were being hit with a lack of transparency and trust in the arrangements.

Kainos has secured a contract of up to three years to strengthen NHS digital capabilities for preventative healthcare.

The award, through NHS England’s Digital Prevention Service Portfolio (DPSP), will improve access to vaccinations and screenings through the NHS App, and will accelerate the delivery of personalised, preventative healthcare in line with the NHS 10 Year Health Plan.

Through the partnership – supported by Public Digital, Baringa, Healthia, Helix Centre, Scroll and ETHOS – Kainos will scale the Digital NHS Health Check service, enabling citizens to complete health assessments and receive tailored advice at home via the NHS App and website.

New digital resources will also support self-care, including mental health tools, weight management support, and diabetes risk reduction pathways.

Author: Chris Maguire

The first thing that strikes you when you visit the offices of PerfectTed is the attention to detail.

The UK’s leading matcha brand found fame when they appeared on Dragons’ Den in 2023 and received offers from all five Dragons.

Eventually they opted to go with Peter Jones and Steven Bartlett for £50k in exchange for 10 per cent of the business.

At the time, Jones quipped: “I think we’re going to make matcha lot of money.”

He was half right. PerfectTed’s founders – Marisa Poster, husband Levi Levenfiche and his brother Teddie Levenfiche – decided they didn’t need Jones’ expertise after all and went all in with Bartlett.

Today PerfectTed is based on an entire floor of Bartlett’s London office building.

I’d been invited for a tour of Bartlett’s Flight Story office, which is how I came to make my unannounced visit to PerfectTed.

Manchester Digital’s MentorHER programme, which supports women in tech through mentoring, has announced its fourth cohort in partnership with CGI.

Launched on Ada Lovelace Day (October 14th), the six-month initiative will offer fully funded places for 20 mentors and 20 mentees, helping women across Greater Manchester develop their careers in the digital and tech sectors.

The partnership comes as new research shows that up to 60,000 women left tech roles in the UK last year, costing the industry billions in lost talent.

Backed by Manchester Digital’s wider Digital Her initiative, the programe aims to tackle this issue by building a stronger, more inclusive community of women in technology. Since its launch in 2022, the programme has supported 120 mentors and mentees.

Aptamer Group, a York-based life sciences company that develops synthetic binders called Optimers, reported a 40% rise in annual revenue to £1.2 million for its latest financial year.

The company grew its portfolio of Optimer assets from four to eleven and signed new royalty deals with Neuro-Bio for Alzheimer’s diagnostics and the University of Glasgow for vaccine development.

It also strengthened partnerships with Unilever and is in talks with major pharma firms over new licensing agreements.

After the year-end, the company raised £1.8m and secured £675,000 in new contracts.

The funds will help expand manufacturing, build new partnerships and push further into the therapeutic and diagnostic markets.

A London-based communication and reporting platform for the construction and infrastructure industry has raised £1.1 million in strategic funding to accelerate its growth and expand its AI capabilities.

The round for SymTerra includes investment from industry and technology angels, alongside innovation funding from Innovate UK.

Backers include Fabienne Viala, former chair and CEO of Bouygues UK, as well as members of HERmesa and Enterprise 100.

The funding will be used to make key hires and advance the company’s SymAI technology, which looks to turn field communication data into actionable insights for construction teams.

Patchworks has raised £5 million to push deeper into North America and bring new AI tools to its retail integration platform as it targets its next stage of growth.

The Nottingham-based company connects retail systems that often fail to talk to one another.

This helps brands to avoid the kind of data chaos that has historically caused stock errors, late deliveries and lost sales.

The new funding round, led by Gresham House Ventures with growth lending from Palatine Growth Credit, follows a 41% year-on-year rise in recurring revenue.

Author: Chris Maguire

THG CEO Matthew Moulding wasn’t pulling any punches this morning when the online retailer gave an impressive Q3 trading update.

Group revenue is up 6.3 per cent to £405.2 while Q3 2025 represents the highest organic quarterly growth since Q4 2021.

The news has seen a significant increase in THG’s share price, which now stands at 39.56 – giving it a market cap of  £550m.

Moulding took to LinkedIn  to say the turnaround followed a ‘brutal’ rebuild of the business, which has seen THG reduce its headcount by almost 5,000 people since January 2022.

“If taking kicks to the nuts was a sport, we’d make the World Cup,” he wrote.

Author: Chris Maguire

It’s a story that connects Dubai’s ultramodern skyscrapers, the North of England and a manor house in East Sussex.

The two main characters in a plot that could come straight out of a Hollywood movie are high profile tech entrepreneur and investor Scott Fletcher and social media personality and podcast host Matt Haycox.

The two – who have swapped the North for the luxury lifestyle, futuristic skyline and all-year-round sun that Dubai offers – are embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious court case about a multi-million pound investment deal that went bad.

Now a court has ruled in favour of Fletcher, founder of Manchester-based ANS Group and chairman of Godel Technologies, after he accused Haycox of ‘commercial fraud’.

The serial tech investor declared on social media ‘finally, justice has been served’ but a cost hearing in December is unlikely to be the end of this remarkable story.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Reach plc says the cost of its restucturing programme – expected to result in hundreds of redundancies – across the full financial year is expected to be £20m.

The publisher of national brands the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, as well as local titles including the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, has released a trading update for the three-month period to 30th September 2025.

It said digital revenue grew 2.1% in the third quarter, while print revenue dropped 3.9%. Overall reveue fell 2.5%.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Bytes Technology Group plc has reported its half-year results following the trials and tribulations of the past 18 months.

The software, security, AI and cloud services specialist, based in Surrey, saw its shares lose a third of their value in one day in early July after it issued a profit warning.

Beginning that day, 2nd July, at around 508p, by its end its share price stood at 353p: it has recovered to 412p following the recent announcement of a £25m share repurchase programme.

For the six months ended 31st August 2025, Bytes revealed a 2.5% rise in revenue to £108.1m. Gross profit increased slightly to £82.4m but operating profit dropped 7% to £33.1m.

The firm endured a scandal last year involving former CEO Neil Murphy after he was accused of unauthorised trading in the company’s shares.

Pinewood Technologies Group PLC has appointed two non-executive directors to its board.

The provider of cloud retail solutions to the automotive industry said Shruthi Chindalur and Dr Robert Plant will join from 14th October.

Chindalur previously held senior leadership roles at Oracle, LinkedIn and Criteo, where she led commercial strategy, international expansion and business transformation across EMEA and the Americas. She most recently held a NED role at The Access Group for four years and is currently a NED at Bytes Technology Group plc and Kainos Group plc, in addition to her role as an advisory board member at FirstParty Capital.

Plant is the founding chair of the Department of Business Technology at the University of Miami and an associate professor at the University of Miami’s Herbert Business School. His innovative work is focused on AI. He has advised global firms including Polen Capital, the global asset manager, and currently serves on the advisory board of Arreva, a fundraising and donor management software business. He has taught executive MBAs across the world and is a frequent contributor on technology issues to publications including the Financial Times, Forbes Insights and Harvard Business Review.

Satsuma Technology PLC has appointed Andrew Smith to its board and as CFO.

He will join the company, a provider of AI-based conversational technologies, on 1st November 2025.

Smith was previously CFO of FTSE 250-listed technology company Playtech PLC from 2017 to 2022. During his time there, he led the corporate, finance and treasury functions, raising billions in funding in the public markets and building relationships across the world’s leading banking and financial institutions.

He started his career in 1999 at Ashurst – including an 18-month secondment at the Financial Conduct Authority – before working as an investment banker for 10 years with ABN AMRO and Deutsche Bank, specialising in fundraisings and M&A for UK listed PLCs.

SkinBioTherapeutics COO Simon Hewitson is to step away from the company on personal grounds.

The AIM-listed life science company, which is focused on skin health, said recruitment for his successor has commenced.

In the meantime, his duties are being managed by Stuart Ashman, CEO, and Emily Bertram, group finance director.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Llanelli Town AFC has become the first Welsh football club to join Republic Europe, the platform for fan and investor ownership in professional sports. 

The move opens the door for supporters and investors across the world to purchase a minority stake in the historic club.

The deal was brokered by Glasgow-based sports agency Intermezzo Sports Ltd, led by CEO Cesare Marchetti, which said the partnership marks a ‘significant milestone in Welsh football’.

Watford FC and AFC Wimbledon have previously run such crowdfunding equity schemes on the Republic Europe – formerly Seedrs – platform. Llanelli supporters will be hoping that the deal plays out in the manner of Wimbledon’s campaign rather than that of Watford.

Author: Patrick Killeen

Digital transformation specialist ANS has acquired Sci-Net Business Solutions, an Oxford-based Microsoft business solutions partner known for its ERP, CRM and cloud infrastructure expertise.

The deal, supported financially by Inflexion and Barings, adds Sci-Net’s 65 consultants, cloud specialists and developers to the Manchester-based firm.

It will expand the company’s capacity to deliver Microsoft-based digital infrastructure upgrades across sectors including retail, e-commerce, and wholesale and distribution.

Oxfordshire-headquartered Sci-Net, which has been operating for 25 years, is recognised for its implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, 365 Business Central, CRM and Microsoft Azure solutions.

Author: Patrick Killeen

A startup developing a desktop-native AI assistant that learns from users’ real workflows has raised an uncapped £940,000 pre-seed round backed by a roster of high-profile investors.

San Francisco-based Attention.inc was founded by 19-year-old Canadian Aidan Guo and 23-year-old German Julian Windeck, who graduated from the University of Cambridge.

Guo previously ran footwear resale group PremeProfits and co-founded sustainable stationery startup Fern before leaving Carnegie Mellon to build Attention in San Francisco.

Windeck brings research experience from Cambridge, MIT and Berkeley, focusing on distributed systems and computer vision.

The founding team also includes graduates from Cambridge and ETH Zurich, as well as social media creator Cole Lee.

The round gained attention and participation from several key industry figures, including Lukas Haas (DeepMind, Sequoia Scout), Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegal (co-founders of Interaction), Silas Alberti (founding team, Cognition), Village Global, Liquid 2 Ventures, Everyday Intelligence and Bryan Pellegrino (co-founder, LayerZero).

The company is building an AI co-pilot designed to automate repetitive, multi-app desktop tasks.

Its software observes user behaviour to anticipate actions, streamline sequences and is expected to handle certain tasks autonomously.

JMAN Group, a commercial data partner for private equity funds and their portfolio companies, has appointed Kaushik Perinkulam Ravi as chief of staff to the CTO.

Perinkulam has spent close to two decades leading enterprise-scale transformation programmes at consultancies such as Cognizant and Agilisium – an emerging life science focused data analytics firm.

More recently, he co-founded TODAC, a management consulting and advisory firm for high-growth technology-based products and professional services organisations, where he has helped businesses sharpen their investor strategy, business planning, technology roadmap, go-to-market execution and operational excellence.

At JMAN he will work closely with CTO Leo Valan to drive strategic planning and operational execution of its data and AI offerings, aligning technology goals with client needs and fostering collaboration across teams and stakeholders.

Zen Internet has appointed Paul North as managing director of its partner division.

The Rochdale company says he will bring fresh energy and focus to the channel and underlining Zen’s ambition to be the UK’s leading alt-net aggregator.

North takes over from Stephen Warburton, who has run Zen’s partner division for over 20 years, but more recently had responsibility for both Zen’s partner and consumer divisions. Warburton will now concentrate fully on the latter.

North has held senior leadership roles at Entanet, later acquired by CityFibre, before joining Giganet to help establish its channel presence. When Giganet’s wholesale arm became part of AllPoints Fibre in 2023, he is said to have played a key role in shaping the new business, building its partner programme from the ground up.