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.

 

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Greggs CFO Richard Hutton is set to retire from the role after 28 years with the company.

Hutton will also step down from the board, which he has served on for 20 years.

Ben Waldron has been appointed as his successor and as an executive director of the company. He will join Greggs plc on 27th October 2026 and take over fully on 1st January 2027, when Hutton will step down.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

NatWest Group has completed its £2.7 billion swoop for wealth management firm Evelyn Partners.

The deal, originally announced in February, completed yesterday and sees an exit for British private equity giant Permira and US peer Warburg Pincus.

Evelyn Partners – formed from the merger of Tilney and Smith & Williamson – has grown from £5bn to £69bn in client assets since 2014, when Permira first invested. Warburg Pincus invested in 2020.

The transaction creates the UK’s leading private banking and wealth management business, the firms say. NatWest Group has £59bn assets – bringing their combined assets to £127bn and total customer assets and liabilities to £188bn.

It transforms NatWest Group’s financial planning and investment management capabilities, with estimated annual run-rate cost synergies of approximately £100m and costs to achieve of approximately £150m.

Payments technology company BR-DGE has secured a £10 million funding round, along with a new growth investor, as it targets international growth.

Founded in Edinburgh in 2018, BR-DGE helps enterprise merchants maximise payment performance and unlock competitive advantage from their payment infrastructure. 

Its orchestration platform brings together routing, tokenisation, data insight and intelligent controls, helping merchants improve approval rates, enhance their customer experience and fine-tune their payment flows across markets.

The company has seen a 15x increase in platform volumes in under two years, with transactions set to exceed 100 million per month by year-end. 

Having established a leadership position in gaming payments, BR-DGE is now expanding into adjacent enterprise sectors, with recent customer wins including major e-commerce business The Hut Group (THG) and betting giant Betfred.

 

London tech firm Omnea has launched a fund giving its employees the chance of winning investment for their own startups.

The AI-native procurement orchestration platform, used by many of the world’s fastest-growing companies, says the Omnea Future Founders Fund – launched in partnership with European angel fund Firedrop – will allow employees of more than five years to pitch founder and CEO Ben Freeman and Pietro Invernizzi, founder and investor at Firedrop, for 30 minutes.

They say employees with winning ideas can secure $250,000 of seed funding on the spot.

 

Kerry Baldwin, Ruth Handcock OBE and Robin Murray have been appointed as non-executive directors to the board of British Business Bank plc, while Piers Lowson has joined the board of BBB Investment Services Limited.

Each term will last for three years from the date of appointment, at the end of which they may be appointed for another three-year term.

In addition, the Government has confirmed the reappointment of Stephen Welton CBE as non-executive chair of the Bank for a second three-year term, from 5th October 2026.

Baldwin is co-founder and managing partner of IQ Capital, a UK DeepTech venture capital firm.

Handcock is a UK financial services leader known for building mission-driven businesses that expand access to investing and financial advice. She most recently served as CEO of Octopus Money, where she built a £5bn assets under management business to deliver the company’s mission to make financial advice simple and accessible to everyone.

Murray brings more than 30 years of Silicon Valley experience as an entrepreneur and investor across venture capital, growth equity and global private markets. He is head of growth equity at Adams Street Partners, a $75bn global private markets investment firm.

Lowson has more than 35 years of investment experience across asset management, investment banking and consultancy. Until 2025, he was a director of Baillie Gifford, one of the UK’s largest and most successful growth equity managers.

Exonate, a biotechnology company developing novel, non-invasive, small-molecule therapeutics for patients with retinal vascular diseases, has appointed Olav Hellebø as CEO.

He will lead the company as it strengthens its executive team and advances toward key clinical and corporate milestones, including initiating a Phase IIb clinical trial of lead candidate EXN407 for diabetic eye disease.

Hellebø has held senior commercial and development roles across the United States and Europe. Notably, he served as Executive Vice President at Schering-Plough (now Merck), leading the US Biotech and Oncology business unit, Chief Operating Officer of Novartis UK and a member of the Novartis Global Pharmaceutical Executive Committee, and President of Immunology at UCB where he built and led the Immunology Division following the company’s acquisition of Celltech plc.

The Competition and Markets Authority is consulting on new conduct requirements for Apple and Google under the UK digital markets competition regime. 

The proposed requirements would remove restrictions currently preventing UK app developers from ‘steering’ their customers away from Apple and Google’s platforms for payment.

‘Steering’ – the ability for developers to engage with customers about off‑platform options – is currently banned by Apple and restricted by Google in the UK. 

Lifting these constraints, the CMA says, would allow developers to bypass mandatory fees set by platforms.

The CMA also said that after hearing concerns from businesses that Apple’s high fees and strict terms prevented access to near field communication (NFC) functionality, it is designing a potential requirement to allow access for developers.

Firms supporting people to buy, trade and hold crypto will need to meet clear standards under landmark rules set out by the Financial Conduct Authority.

All firms must meet financial resilience requirements including capital and stress testing. The FCA is also introducing new market integrity rules covering areas such as insider trading and market manipulation.  

The new framework also sets out specific rules for stablecoins, a type of cryptoasset designed to maintain a stable value, typically by being linked to a currency such as the pound. The approach was published jointly with The Bank of England.

An industrialised construction company which has developed innovative technology to build homes from recycled glass panels has secured more than £5m in funding to help it tackle the UK’s housing crisis.

VASO Global is a world-leading housebuilding innovator which takes waste glass and converts it into high‑performance structural composite panels capable of delivering rapid, low‑carbon, modular homes and buildings.

The company combines digital design, integrated manufacture and semi-autonomous construction, to provide affordable, thermally efficient, low-carbon homes which are swift to construct, enabling it to respond to the UK’s need to build more homes more quickly.

VASO Global, based in Dumfries, has secured £1.4m seed investment from PXN Ventures along with £621k from Scottish Enterprise. The company has also secured a £2m loan approved by Innovate UK Loans Limited, a division of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and £800k from ECO GROUP which will be the delivery partner for the initial VASO Global build projects.

VASO by Eco had previously secured £330k from South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) to advance the commercial roll-out of its innovative recycled-glass building technology.

The latest funding will enable VASO Global to develop manufacturing processes at its new 60,000-square-feet manufacturing site in Dumfries, creating up to 70 jobs within the next five years, with the plant adopting industrialised construction methods.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

FTSE 100 listed UK property group Segro has again slammed a £12.6 billion takeover bid from a US rival and says it will not be sold ‘on the cheap’.

Segro owns a portfolio of warehouses and data centres, mainly in the South East of England, and has benefited from the growth of online shopping.

The company recently rejected the all-share bid from Prologis ‘unanimously and unequivocally’ and said it fell ‘a long way short’ of own valuation and was ‘opportunistically timed’.

This morning Prologis issued a response setting out the strategic and financial rationale for the proposed combination – but Segro has been unequivocal in its reply.

Manchester-based CareLoop Health is reporting strong early traction following a £1.8m funding round from NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance, the GMC Life Sciences Fund by PXN Ventures, Verge HealthTech Fund and SFC Capital, supporting the business to scale its technology and expand clinical adoption across the UK and internationally.

Launched in 2021, Careloop Health is a University of Manchester spinout focused on transforming care in  severe mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis. Built on more than a decade of research and clinical trials prior to spinout, the CareLoop digital platform integrates into existing care pathways, enabling clinicians to remotely monitor patients while using algorithm-driven insights to predict and prevent relapses.

Since securing the investment in 2025, CareLoop Health has grown its team from two to ten employees, strengthening its clinical, technical and commercial capabilities as it moves towards wider adoption. The business has also secured an SBRI Healthcare grant along with funding from NHS England, enabling pilot programmes across five NHS trusts, while building a strong commercial pipeline as it looks to convert pilots into long-term contracts. The company’s growth reflects increasing momentum across the UK’s digital health and life sciences sectors, both identified as priority areas in the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy.

Alongside its UK growth, CareLoop Health has begun expanding internationally, with two sites in the United States. The company has also been accepted into the NHS Innovation Accelerator, with COO Dr Pauline Whelan awarded a fellowship.

Trainline plc has announced the appointment of Niall McBride as audit and risk committee chair and independent non-executive director of the company with effect from 1st July 2026.

He will also join Trainline’s nomination and remuneration committees.

McBride is currently CFO of MONY Group. Prior to this, he was CFO of Ocado Retail and a managing director at Rothschild & Co.

Digital banking platform Tide has launched a dedicated investment account for SMEs.

The Tide Investment Account (TIA) brings business investing directly into the platform where more than 900,000 UK SMEs already manage their finances.

The new offering is designed to help business owners grow surplus cash through investing, removing many of the barriers that have historically made wealth creation more complicated for smaller businesses.

Author: Jonathan Symcox

Harrogate entrepreneur Jonathan Yates has launched Caskd, a digital platform that gives whisky enthusiasts a way to buy, sell and manage their collections.

As whisky collecting continues to grow, many enthusiasts are questioning the high costs associated with traditional auction houses. Seller commissions, buyer’s premiums, shipping costs and lengthy settlement times can make buying and selling both expensive and frustrating.

Caskd offers an alternative by removing unnecessary middlemen and enabling enthusiasts to trade directly with one another through a trusted community.

Huddled Group plc has raised £1,244,000 – including £175k from executive chairman Martin Higginson – from management and institutional investors in a share placing.

The AIM-listed circular economy eCommerce group, behind brands including Discount Dragon, has also launched a retail investment offer for up to £100k.

It says the raise will help it become operationally cash flow positive.