Startups

The government has opened applications for Scale UK Connect, a 12-month pilot that will give 200 high-growth companies account management, investor introductions and trade support. London & Partners will lead it, with delivery partners in Manchester, the West Midlands, the South West, Yorkshire and Scotland.

Chancellor John Healey's first Budget introduces Founders' Relief, a 10% capital gains tax rate on qualifying share disposals up to a £10m lifetime limit per individual, while halving the Business Asset Disposal Relief allowance from £1m to £500,000.

Concretene, a University of Manchester spinout, has raised £4.5m in the first close of its Series A. The round includes £2m from the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, managed by PXN Ventures, with follow-on money from existing backers LocalGlobe and Molten Ventures.

Founded by designer Junior Magalhães, the studio now counts Marfin Co. founder Ivan Cordeiro Junior as a partner and sells product design, brand and engineering to well-funded startups and global brands, with engagements from US$30,000 a month.

Alex Depledge will leave her role as the Treasury's entrepreneurship adviser on Thursday, the day after John Healey's first Budget. Ministers are expected to use that Budget to unveil a capital gains "rollover relief" for founders, paid for by changes to Business Asset Disposal Relief.

Oxfordshire's innovation partnership Equinox has set a target of 20 billion-dollar companies, more than £1bn a year in venture and growth investment and 30,000 net new jobs by 2035. It also wants backing from 10 leading US venture firms and 10 UK pension funds.

Unravel Health, a spinout built on research from the University of Glasgow, has raised £2.5m in a round co-led by Conduit EIS Impact Fund and Wrightwood. The money will take its palm-sized Micro Lab to first early-access devices in 2027. The company has now raised more than £3.5m in equity and non-dilutive funding combined.

Silvia Bio, a University of Sheffield biomanufacturing spinout, has raised a £3m seed round led by Northern Gritstone. The money will fund a move into its own laboratory and a tripling of headcount.

Nvidia is investing in five UK startups — Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente and Riverlane — taking minority stakes on undisclosed terms, hours after committing $250m of compute to UK AI safety and research.

The Capital Markets Industry Taskforce has told Chancellor John Healey that the shortage of London listings is a "strategic growth problem". It proposes a 10% dividend tax credit for pension funds that it says could channel up to £125bn of equity into UK companies by 2042, at a cost of up to £742m a year.

Edtech group Kortext has bought StudyStash, an adaptive learning platform started by two University of Birmingham computer science students, a year after its founders graduated. Terms were not disclosed; the platform is used by tens of thousands of students across more than 160 institutions on three continents.

London matcha brand PerfectTed expects to pass $100m (about £75m) in annual recurring revenue this year as it turns five. The company raised a Felix Capital-led round at a £140m valuation last October, and all of its roughly 80 staff hold equity.

StandardX has launched with £10m of seed funding co-led by Vsquared Ventures and East X Ventures, with firstminute capital, UKI2S, Brevan Howard Macro Venture and Geometry joining the round. The London company plans to supply its first isotopes to a medical research partner in 2027 and reach industrial-scale production by 2029.

Cardiff-based Final Rentals has become the first business in Wales to borrow against its intellectual property through NatWest, taking a six-figure loan rather than opening a fourth equity round, after lifting bookings by 200% this year.

Administrators to BrewDog have confirmed that HSBC will recover £42.5m of the £59.7m it was owed across its lending, equipment finance and invoice finance arms, leaving a shortfall of about £17.2m. Former staff are owed £489,000 in unpaid wages and holiday pay, and HMRC will lose £2.4m.

Magnitude Biosciences, a Durham University spinout, has raised £1.3m led by Northstar Ventures, which invested from three separate vehicles in the same round. The raise also unlocks a £217,000 Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant, taking total new capital available to the business to more than £1.5m.

Brave Bison has raised its hostile offer for System1 Group for a fourth time, to 135p in cash plus 2.394 new Brave Bison shares, an implied 360p that values the AIM-listed research firm at about £47.5m — up from the £43.1m third offer System1's board rejected last month.

London proptech Ostrich has ceased trading five years after it was founded, writing off the $3.98m it raised from Harry Stebbings' 20VC and New York proptech specialist Era Ventures. A source close to the company said it had failed to grow at the rate expected; the terms of the wind-down were not disclosed.

Tickets for Good has raised £3.9m from a syndicate led by NPIF II – Mercia Equity Finance, with Shaping Impact Group, Finance Yorkshire, Leansquare and private investors joining, to fund international expansion and 10 new jobs in Sheffield over three years.

Castore has appointed JPMorgan to test buyer interest after a run of inbound approaches, three years after an external equity round valued the Manchester-based sportswear brand at about £950m. No formal process has started, and any deal could take the form of a majority sale, a minority stake or a partnership.

Britain incorporated 388,922 companies in the first half of 2026, up 9 per cent year on year and equivalent to 90 new businesses an hour, according to iwoca's annual Business Hotspots report. Scotland recorded the strongest growth at 16 per cent, while Wales was the only nation or region to decline, down 23 per cent to 11,668.

European tech companies raised €3.2bn across 165 rounds in August, down roughly 63 per cent on July's €8.6bn, according to Tech.eu data published on Friday. The UK was the single largest market, taking €1.4bn across 51 transactions — about 44 per cent of the continental total.

AIM-listed Pri0r1ty Intelligence Group has acquired the operating assets and technology of employee benefits platform Pirkx for £50,000 in cash plus a 4% revenue royalty capped at £350,000. Pirkx had raised £5.4m from venture backers since 2018.

Edinburgh-based pureLiFi has appointed joint administrators from BTG after failing to secure further funding, with all 42 employees made redundant immediately. The light-based wireless communications firm had raised more than £35m from over ten investors since 2012, including the Scottish National Investment Bank.

The AIM-listed group has acquired the entire issued share capital of Captive Devices, a two-year-old MediaCity motion capture startup founded by three former Epic Games engineers. Total consideration is up to £750,000: £250,000 in cash, £300,000 in Oxford Metrics ordinary shares released quarterly over 24 months, and an earnout of up to £200,000.

The livestock data platform, founded in London in 2018 and run from Texas since 2022, has raised $27m (about £20m) in a Series B led by Partech's impact fund, taking total capital raised to $46.6m.

Madrid-headquartered Taptap Digital has bought Manchester adtech firm Skyrise, with founders Ian Vint, Michelle Vint and Alex Petrie exiting the business three years after they merged Regital and Skyrise Intelligence. Terms were not disclosed.

Loughborough University has set up the Loughborough Venture Investor Network with VC firm Haatch, matching alumni investors to spinouts and startups raising at pre-seed and seed. No fund size, cheque range or equity terms were disclosed.

Food platform Sessions has acquired Little Bao Boy, the Leeds bao bun brand that has grown 431% year on year and delivered more than 340,000 orders. Terms were not disclosed, but founder James Ooi retains a minority holding in the brand.

Trellus Health, the Welsh-registered digital health company that raised £28.5m gross when it floated on AIM in May 2021, has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators and told the market that no return is expected for shareholders.

Aberdeen-based HexSeed Technology has closed more than £600,000 in early-stage funding led by climate-tech venture builder Carbon13, with the Net Zero Technology Centre and Italian firm Vento participating. The round also unlocks an Innovate UK Partnership Grant awarded provisionally earlier this year.

Harpenden-based EcoNomad Solutions has closed a £400,000 round built from £230,000 of equity from the British Design Fund, an Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant and follow-on support from existing backer Beeches Group. The blended structure limits dilution on a cap table that remains founder-controlled.

London-based Platter, which builds a food-native operating system for suppliers, wholesalers and manufacturers, has extended its latest venture round with backing from supply-chain specialist Verb Ventures, having surpassed £100m in annual trade processed through the platform.