Author: Jonathan Symcox

There is a changing of the guard in the drinks industry – and Manchester brand Hip Pop is at the forefront of the trend.

Originally known as Booch & Brew, it all started back in 2019 in co-founder Emma Thackray’s kitchen.

“Kenny [Goodman], the other co-founder, has a real issue with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome),” CEO Matt Bowler-Jones tells me for Founder Friday.

“Meanwhile Emma had discovered kombucha brewing – and its benefits for gut health – while living in the United States.

“They [and their partners] met when they were looking for childcare and started talking about this.”

Emma was the founder of Hello Pure, a nutritional supplements brand which was acquired in 2021, while Kenny is a serial entrepreneur.

“They said: Why don’t we do this?” continues Matt.

Emma began brewing small-batch kombucha recipes using real fruit and live cultures in jars in her kitchen in Altrincham.

Two years later the fermentation was moved to a farm in Cheshire and the business was renamed Hip Pop. By 2023, the microbrewery had taken up residence in the iconic railway arches on North Western Street in Manchester.

Today it has 10 canned drinks available: four sodas, four kombuchas and two kombuchas containing CBD.

So how did we get here?

SME finance platform Funding Circle has appointed Tamsin Todd as an independent non-executive director.

Todd is a former CEO of Findmypast, managing director at TUI Group, head of eCommerce at Betfair, and previously held marketing, product and commercial roles at Microsoft and Amazon.

She is currently a NED at The Gym Group plc, Auction Technology Group plc and INTO University Partnerships.

Neil Rimer will step down as a NED from 30th September 2026.

MedPal AI Plc has raised £5m in a share placing just three months after raising £3m.

The funding will be used to complete the acquisition of Solid State Technologies Ltd, a profitable electronic Medicines Administration Record software business, completing MedPal’s closed-loop care-home medication platform.

It also positions the company to capture the UK launch of the oral GLP-1 weight-loss pill (oral Wegovy), launching in the UK on Monday, through investment in stock and patient acquisition.

Data intelligence company StirlingX has raised £15 million in Series A funding.

The London firm is building a sovereign intelligence and autonomy platform to help customers capture, secure, fuse, analyse and act on data from complex and contested environments.

The company, chaired by the former director of GCHQ, addresses one of the most consequential challenges in modern national security – the secure capture of, and ability to act upon, high-value data at speed and scale in complex, sensitive and contested environments.

Two childhood friends have now raised $1 million for their Manchester-based AI startup BidScript.

Henry Brogan and Tyler McCarthy launched the AI tender management business while still at university to address a fundamental flaw in the bidding of public and private contracts.

Hundreds of billions of pounds of public and private contracts are awarded each year, yet most businesses are still completing tenders manually, using highly time-consuming spreadsheets and shared drives. BidScript helps businesses find, qualify, manage, write and submit bids.

The firm – which has a focus on construction and engineering, IT and education – has raised $800,000 in its latest funding round, bringing the total pre-seed funding received to date to over $1m. 

Google has been handed a European Union fine of €4.1 billion (£3.5bn) following an eight-year battle for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals.

Back in 2018 then European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager announced a €4.3bn fine following a 39-month investigation which found the search engine giant was breaking EU antitrust laws by forcing Android phone and tablet manufacturers to pre-install its search app and Chrome browser.

It was also accused of making payments to manufacturers and mobile network operators that agreed to exclusively pre-install the search app on their devices, and of preventing manufacturers from selling smart devices powered by alternative versions of Android.

Google appealed and the fine was reduced slightly to €4.1 bn in 2022. A further appeal has now been dismissed.

Performance marketing group Connective3 has secured growth investment from regional private equity and real assets investment manager Foresight Group.

The Leeds-headquartered firm says it will invest further in its own AI technology as well as target international expansion and strategic acquisitions.

Founded by Tim Grice, Connective3 now employs more than 140 specialists across Leeds, Manchester and London, and counts the likes of HSBC, Adobe and Wren Kitchens among its clients.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Shares in Currys PLC have fallen 3% today despite reporting a positive set of annual results and announcing a new £50 million share buyback.

Currys reported strong growth in annual revenue and profits ahead of CEO Alex Baldock’s departure this autumn for Boots.

The London-listed electricals retailer’s share price remains 25% up in the year to date.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Everton’s new front-of-shirt sponsor CMC Markets is closing on a valuation of £2 billion after it leapt almost 60% in just two days.

Yesterday the FTSE 250 multi-asset financial services firm said it expects net operating income for FY2027 to be at least £550 million, materially ahead of previous guidance of £460-480m, with EBITDA guidance of £250m.

FY2027 guidance for operating expenses excluding variable remuneration of approximately £280m remained unchanged.

CMC’s share price is up 134% in the year to date and 185% in the last 12 months.

It was also announced that CMC would be the new front-of-shirt sponsor for Everton FC from next season as the club’s new main partner in a landmark multi-year agreement. 

Its branding will appear on the club’s senior men’s, women’s and under-21s kits. 

Entrepreneur and investor Simon Squibb has launched DreamFund to back would-be founders who lack access to traditional sources of capital.

The fund is powered by 10% of profits from every company in The Dream Group, Squibb says, including HelpBnk and his media business.

Unlike traditional grants, loans or venture funding, DreamFund claims to have no gatekeepers, no equity demands, and no repayment.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Currys has reported strong growth in annual revenue and profits ahead of Alex Baldock’s departure.

The CEO will leave the London-listed electricals retailer this autumn for Boots.

Group statutory profit before tax for the year ended 2nd May was £191 million, up 18% on the previous year, with group revenue coming in at close to £9.3 billion – up 6% year on year.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Getty Images has scrapped a £3 billion merger with rival Shutterstock after a ruling by the UK competitions watchdog.

The merger of the US-listed photo agencies was announced last year and approved by US regulators – but following a deepened investigation, the Competition and Markets Authority ruled that the latter had to sell its editorial arm as a condition of the deal.

Getty’s board has now voted to terminate the deal, according to a regulatory filing.

Lucida AI, a speech-to-speech AI platform for global communication, has raised a £5.3 million seed round led by UK-based Velocity Capital. 

The round also included participation from European investors, including Next Tier Ventures and Look AI Ventures, alongside Turkey’s Bogazici Ventures, Yapı Kredi Frwrd Ventures and Ünlü & Co.

The round follows a $1.25m pre-seed investment led by Neo Asset Management, bringing the company’s total funding to $8.25m.

Lucida AI will use the new capital to expand into new languages and geographies, further develop its proprietary speech-to-speech AI infrastructure, scale its enterprise offering globally, and accelerate product development.

 

Cambridge Future Tech has announced the acquisition of Vest Coast Capital, a US-based investment and advisory firm specialising in the capitalisation and commercialisation of transformative, early-stage technologies.

CFT co-founds and builds DeepTech ventures from proprietary research scouted from leading UK research institutions and corporate innovation groups.

The transaction significantly expands CFT’s investment portfolio and strategic presence in the United States, building a global platform for the commercialization of deep technologies.

Rick Hao, solo GP and founder of Ruya Ventures, has revealed a $50 million (£38m) fundraise for his first VC fund.

The fund is focused on supporting global DeepTech innovation, as it shifts from the lab into real-world deployment.

Ruya Ventures, whilst rooted in Europe, will build a portfolio of 20 DeepTech companies worldwide, backing frontier technologies that solve meaningful but difficult problems that others would shy away from. 

 

YFM Equity Partners has appointed James Warburton as investment director in its North West team, bringing more than 15 years of investment and advisory experience to the firm’s Manchester office.

Warburton joins from Gresham House, having previously held roles at Endless and Deloitte. His background spans both advisory and direct investment.

The appointment comes alongside two promotions: Oli Wheatley to investment director, having led YFM’s recent £7m investment into StudentCrowd and supported transactions including TNP and Fuuse; and James Curtis to senior investment manager, having worked across investments including S4 Labour, Ohalo, inploi and TiPJAR since joining in 2023.

 

Bytes Technology Group plc has announced that Patrick De Smedt will step down from his role as chair of the board by 30th September 2026.

He has served as chair since the company’s listing in 2020 and wishes to devote more time to other professional and personal interests.

Gavin Rochussen has been appointed as an independent non-executive director and chair-designate, with effect from 10th July 2026.

Bytes, a software, security, AI and cloud services specialist, said Tapiwa Ngara will also join the board as a NED this month.

Shares in Bytes are up in the year to date despite the recent departure of its MD Jack Watson, who left ‘by mutual consent’ and won’t be replaced. However it has lost 25% of its value in the last 12 months.

It has been a turbulent two years for the firm, which in 2024 began investigating the shock resignation of its former CEO Neil Murphy after he was accused of unauthorised trading in the company’s shares.

The investigation ultimately found 119 unauthorised transactions on 66 trading days between January 2021 and November 2023 which sent the London-listed stock plummeting.

The firm rebounded under new CEO Sam Mudd, but dropped again after disappointing trading updates.

Andy Burnham has grown his social media following to more than one million after a 26 per cent increase in the past week.

The Makerfield MP’s combined following on TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook has grown from 828,000 on June 23 to 1.05 million today (July 1).

While most of Burnham’s followers are on X, the biggest growth has come on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Burnham’s self-deprecating sense of humour has seen his following on Instagram and TikTok grow by 236 per cent and 55 per cent respectively over the past week.

Over the same period, his Facebook following has grown from 109,000 to 192,000 – an increase of 76 per cent.

On Monday, Burnham took the unusual step of not taking questions from journalists after setting out his vision for the UK in a speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

Andy Burnham’s social media following on July 1

• Facebook 192k
• Instagram 136k
• TikTok 87.7k
• X 633.4k

Physiomics plc, a mathematical modelling, data science and biostatistics company supporting the development of new therapeutics and personalised medicine solutions, has announced the promotion of Jesse Thissen to the position of COO.

Activist investor Mike Whitlow was appointed executive director of the listed firm recently after more than three-quarters of shareholders voted to remove former chair Dr Jim Millen as part of a wholesale replacement of the board.

The firm says Thissen has served as head of biometrics and has played an instrumental role in strengthening the company’s operational capabilities, technical leadership and project delivery.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Tapestry VC has launched an $80 million (£60m) Fund III to double its scale and deepen its focus on backing repeat founders across Europe and North America.

At almost three times the size of the firm’s previous funds, the fund is co-anchored by a $40m commitment from new sovereign investor British Business Bank, alongside returning institutional co-anchors Railpen – a £35 billion pension plan – and Molten Ventures – a £1bn fund-of-fund. 

Notable tech leaders, such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, are also joining the new fund.

Tapestry has also opened a flagship London office, with founder Patrick Murphy relocating from San Francisco to the UK capital after a decade of investing on both sides of the Atlantic.