M&G Investments and Schroders are among the firms bidding to manage the £1bn Scale-up Fund, the pension-backed vehicle announced in July and administered with British Business Bank support, according to reporting by Sky News.
Mercia Business Loans has deployed more than £20m to 55 businesses across the North of England since the £660m Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II launched, with the majority of recipients based in Yorkshire and the Humber.
London-based Resolutiion has raised $10.4m from Cherry Ventures, Octopus Ventures, LocalGlobe and Berlin female-founder fund Auxxo, taking its AI dispute-detection platform into defence and energy contracts.
The British Business Bank has committed a further £10m to Haatch through its Regional Angels Programme, lifting that commitment to £30m and taking the total capital Haatch manages on the bank's behalf to £62m. More than 70% of it has gone to companies headquartered outside London.
Big Technologies has confirmed that mediated settlement talks with founder Sara Murray have collapsed and that it will resume litigation, on the same morning it reported a £9.1m statutory operating profit against a £27.1m loss a year earlier. Murray still controls about a quarter of the voting rights.
Harwell-based Open Cosmos has raised €300m in a round led by Lightrock, roughly six times the $50m it took in its previous raise, with the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund and Phoenix Court among the backers joining the register.
Accel-KKR has agreed to buy London-listed construction software group Eleco plc for £207.6m on a fully diluted basis, paying 235p a share in cash — a 74.7% premium to the previous closing price — with 45.2% of the register already committed.
London-based Fresha has appointed country leads in Germany and Mexico and opened a Berlin office, three months after taking an $80m primary investment from KKR-managed funds at a valuation above $1bn. The company has raised $285m in total.
British AI chip designer Fractile is in talks to raise around $600m at a $6.5bn valuation, according to reports, three months after closing a $220m round. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are named among the prospective co-leads.
Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky is in talks over a new incentive package that would hand him a fresh block of stock if the fintech reaches a valuation of around $500bn (€433bn), a milestone that sits far above the $115bn implied by its current secondary round.
