Funding

London-based Claret Capital Partners has held the final close of Claret European Growth Capital Fund IV at €575m, ahead of a €500m target and up from the €350m second close announced a year ago. More than 90% of the capital came from institutions, including the British Business Bank, the European Investment Fund, Germany's KfW and Ireland's ISIF.

EQT has agreed to acquire a majority stake in London-based specialty (re)insurance broker McGill and Partners at an enterprise value of $2bn (roughly £1.48bn), buying out founding backer Warburg Pincus while founders Steve McGill and John Lloyd reinvest and all 600-plus staff take a payout through the firm's all-employee ownership structure.

London-based AI Score has closed a £4m seed round led by Fuel Ventures, with founding investor GALLOS Technologies following on, taking the 2025-founded governance startup's total raised to roughly £4.7m. The valuation was not disclosed.

Strolll, a Stafford-based software-as-a-medical-device company building augmented reality neurorehabilitation tools, has secured £4.3m (€5m) from Innovate UK across a £3.6m innovation loan and a £700k grant, plus a separate equity round led by IW Capital with Cleveland Clinic and Future Planet Capital Regional participating.

The British Business Bank has agreed to commit up to £46m to Zinc Capital Management's second institutional vehicle, the Science-for-Impact Fund, through its Enterprise Capital Funds programme. The fund is targeting £70m and aims to build a portfolio of 80 new deeptech companies.

The UK medical imaging company has closed $220m (£162m) in combined financing: a $90m (£66m) equity round led by Noteus Partners, with Aviva, Concord Health Partners, YZR Capital and Oxford Capital participating, plus $130m (£96m) of debt from VerisFi Capital and Atempo Growth. Revenue has doubled over the past year to a $165m (£122m) annualised run rate.

Mollie has closed its €1.1bn acquisition of GoCardless, with more than 90% of the consideration paid in Mollie shares. The price is about half the $2.1bn valuation GoCardless carried after its 2022 Series G, and hands its Balderton, BlackRock and Permira backers equity in the enlarged Dutch group rather than cash.

Allica Bank has applied to Finansinspektionen for a Swedish banking licence, its first move outside the UK, six months after a $155m Series D led by Ventura Capital valued the lender at around $1.2bn. The bank has lent more than £4bn to UK businesses and has over 15,000 current account customers.

Oxfordshire silicon anode developer Nexeon has closed a £100m ($133m) investment round in which the National Wealth Fund put in £52.6m ($70m), joined by the Korea Development Bank and Honda Xcelerator Ventures. Valuation was not disclosed.

Bristol-based Ponda has closed a crowdfunding round at £1.4m (€1.6m) on Republic Europe, roughly seven times its £200,000 minimum target, adding 256 new shareholders to its register. The listing offered 15.8% of the company at £12.54 a share, implying a post-money valuation of about £8.9m.

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.

Imperial College London spinout RFC Power has closed a £10m Series A led by the state-owned British Business Bank, which wrote a £3.5m cheque, and has relaunched as Certain Energy with Centrica, LSE-listed Ceres Power and Temasek Trust's climate fund on the register.

London-based Itoflow has closed a $2.5m (£1.8m) pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital, with Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo among the angels backing a company founded only this year.

London-based Embedd has closed a €2.3m ($2.7m) pre-seed round led by Seedcamp, with eight further funds joining the cap table. Valuation and ownership terms were not disclosed.

Golf technology startup Paralo has closed an oversubscribed £270,000 pre-seed round, of which £250,000 was raised under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, to build an operating system for golf clubs and a connected product for players.

BGF has invested €13m for a minority stake in Redfaire, the Limerick-headquartered Oracle ERP and cloud services group that employs more than 200 people across Ireland, the UK, mainland Europe and North America. Founder-led since 2003, the company keeps control.

Plymouth-based Oshen has closed a £3.65m round led by Lunar Ventures, with AlbionVC, Twin Track and Concept Ventures joining alongside angel backers. The four-year-old marine robotics company is tripling production of its C-Star vessels and has 100 more on order.

The University of Edinburgh spinout has raised $2.15m (£1.6m) from a syndicate spanning ACF Investors, Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and the university's own investment arm, and says it has already doubled its full-year 2025 sales.

Edinburgh sustainable materials company Kenoteq has banked almost £900,000 in a first tranche led by Kelvin Capital, alongside the Scottish Enterprise Co-Investment Fund and existing shareholders. The round remains open and the company is targeting £2m in total.

QuantumLight, the London venture firm founded by Revolut chief executive Nik Storonsky, has closed an oversubscribed $500m second fund — double the size of the $250m debut vehicle it raised in 2025, and closed roughly 15 months later.

Macclesfield-based Redx Pharma has struck a $125m (about £88m) financing package alongside a transaction agreement with Skye Bioscience that will take the combined business onto Nasdaq as Fibrx Therapeutics, funding operations into 2029.

GALLOS Technologies, the defence venture studio chaired in part by former GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming, has secured a $50m (£35m) balance-sheet investment co-led by Ventura Capital and Aberdeen Investments, with founding backer Lansdowne Partners following on. The round remains open to further strategic investors.

The London-based talent platform has closed a £500,000 pre-seed round led by SFC Capital, with angel investors including existing backers participating. Terms and valuation were not disclosed.

The University of Nottingham spinout has been awarded £619,000 through Innovate UK's Frontier AI programme, following an earlier £100,000 award. The money is non-dilutive grant funding, leaving the company's equity structure unchanged.

Metal Morph, a UK water-technology startup founded in 2025, has raised £700,000 in pre-seed funding co-led by Sustainable Ventures and Green Angel Ventures, with Aqcelerator and Found Capital also taking part. The company recovers industrial chemicals from water and wastewater treatment for reuse, and separately holds a £100,000 Ofwat grant with a further £450,000 available on milestones.

Manchester cybersecurity startup Cytix has closed a $7m (£5.1m) Series A round led by Northern Gritstone, which put in £3m, to scale a platform that assesses the security risk of software changes generated by AI coding tools.

Bristol-based Vertical Aerospace has secured $100m (£74m), combining a $40m cheque from Mudrick Capital Management, $35m of fresh equity from existing and new backers and a $25m draw on its preferred equity facility, to fund certification of its Valo aircraft.

Manchester climate-tech spinout Watercycle Technologies has been awarded £3m of non-dilutive grant funding towards a £6m project to build a demonstration-scale line that recovers and refines battery-grade lithium from waste streams, addressing a gap the UK currently fills entirely through imports.

Cambridge Aerospace has closed a $300m Series C led by DFJ Growth at a $3.4bn post-money valuation, roughly 2.6 times the $1.3bn it commanded just four months ago and a striking mark-up for a company founded less than two years ago.

The British Business Bank has deployed a further £100m ($134m) to back first-time and underrepresented venture capital fund managers, acting as cornerstone investor in pre-seed and seed microfunds as early-stage cheques across Europe dry up.

Glasgow biotech Mironid has raised a €39.9m ($46m) Series B led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, with Roche Venture Fund and Sofinnova Partners among the participants, to push its lead kidney disease candidate towards the clinic.

London-based AI chip designer OLIX has closed a €270.5m ($312m) Series B at a €2.8bn ($3.3bn) valuation just two years after it was founded, with Arm, Hudson River Trading and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings among the backers.

Crawley-based Naked Energy has closed a £27m Series B, with a final £8.875m tranche led by Great British Energy's first major solar investment of £7.5m alongside Barclays Climate Ventures, to fund a new UK manufacturing facility for its solar-thermal technology.

North East manufacturer Advanced Electric Machines has raised £16m in combined equity and debt to expand production of magnet-free electric motors, drawing in Barclays Climate Ventures alongside an Innovate UK loan.

Edinburgh legaltech Wordsmith has added $14m (£10.4m) to its Series B in an extension led by Intact Private Capital, lifting total funding raised to roughly $84m (£62m) as the company pushes further into North America.

London-based Humanoid has closed a $152m Series A led by Prime Movers Lab, minting a $1.35bn post-money valuation and what backers call Europe's first pure-play humanoid-robotics unicorn — with strategic cheques from Bosch and Schaeffler landing on the register.