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.
Emulate, a London AI company incorporated in August by three former Google DeepMind researchers, is negotiating a seed round of up to $700m at a post-money valuation of about $3.7bn. Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners are leading. The company has no product, no revenue and no website.
Chemify has assembled an £89.9m expansion package built on £16m from Scottish Enterprise and £6m from the UK Government, with the Glasgow company funding the remaining £67.9m itself. The programme will lift its Scottish headcount from 152 to roughly 450 within three years.
London's Crane Venture Partners has closed $484m (about £359m) across four separate vehicles, eleven years after the firm launched. MassMutual Ventures, a minority shareholder in the management company itself since 2018, anchored every fund and is the central backer of a new $100m US vehicle.
Manchester-based Ryft has closed a £20m (€23m) Series B led by Gresham House Ventures, with existing backers Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital following on. The round is roughly three and a half times the size of the company's €6.6m Series A in April 2025.
London fintech Quartz has closed a £2.75m pre-seed round led by Paris-based Daphni, with Outward VC and K Fund joining the register alongside angels including Kantox founder Philippe Gelis. The company is tracking more than £10m of member assets after testing since the first quarter of 2026.
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.
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.
