Funding

Bridgend-based Reclinker has closed an oversubscribed £10m Series A co-led by Clean Growth Fund and AP Ventures, with the Development Bank of Wales joining the cap table. The Cambridge spinout plans to scale production in Cardiff towards 120,000 tonnes a year.

The British Business Bank has committed £10m to the Fuel Ventures funds through its Regional Angels Programme. The London-based firm has deployed more than £280m across over 230 early-stage UK companies since 2013.

Tesco is among several parties considering an offer for Majestic Wine, which owner Fortress Investment Group put up for sale several weeks ago. The chain, bought for £95m in 2019, is expected to fetch hundreds of millions of pounds.

London-based DIG Ventures has closed Fund III at $120m, backed by Horsley Bridge, Sofina and Granite, and plans to invest in about 30 European companies at pre-seed and seed. The firm intends to lead most of those rounds and has already started deploying.

London-based Foundational has emerged from stealth with £8.2m ($10.8m) of pre-seed funding from Inflection, BACKED, Final Frontier, Adjacent and Type One Ventures. The company says it is the largest pre-seed raised by a European space technology business.

52North, a University of Cambridge medtech spinout, has raised £3.2m in equity in a round co-led by Macmillan Ventures and Hargreave Hale AIM VCT. The round takes its total equity funding past £7.5m.

UK venture funds from the 2002–2021 vintages returned a pooled 1.78x total value to paid-in capital (TVPI), level with the US and ahead of the rest of Europe at 1.67x. Among 2020–2024 vintages, UK funds returned 1.40x, against 1.24x in the US.

Bids for UK-listed companies have reached $132.9bn (£100bn) so far in 2026, up 175% year on year, generating more than £1.2bn in fees for investment banks, law firms and accountants. EQT's £10.6bn takeover of Intertek alone is expected to produce more than £370m.

OneClickComply, a Sunderland cyber-compliance start-up, has closed a £1m round from the North East Accelerate Fund, managed by Mercia Ventures, with follow-on money from two Northstar Ventures vehicles. The round takes its total funding past £2.4m, and the company says monthly recurring revenue has doubled in six months.

UK fundraising platform givestar has raised £9m ($12m) in a growth round led by Mercia, with Love Ventures participating. The company says it has helped raise more than $70m for over 4,000 charities and will use the capital to push into the US.

London-based Basecamp Research has closed a $140m Series C led by S32, taking its total funding to $225m. Anthropic's Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund are among the new names on the register, while Nvidia's NVentures has followed on.

MAGIC AI has raised £8m ($11m) in a Series B co-led by Beringea and existing backer IW Capital, taking total funding to roughly $20m (about £14.9m) since 2023. The London company says the US, where it already has more than 18,000 members, will account for most of its revenue next year.

The British Business Bank has committed £50m to Phoenix Court's family of funds, with NatWest, HSBC and M&G investing alongside it in a package the firm puts in the hundreds of millions of pounds. For NatWest it is a first: the bank has never before taken a direct limited partner position in an independently managed venture fund.

The RAC has paused a London float that had been expected to value the breakdown group at around £5bn, with Silver Lake and Singapore's GIC in advanced talks to sell their holdings to CVC Capital Partners and other investors in a private deal that would delay any listing by at least 18 months.

Ada Ventures has led a £2.3m seed round into InTouchNow, which runs artificial intelligence voice agents on GP practice phone lines. Exceptional Ventures and Kadmos Capital took part in what the firm describes as one of its largest seed cheques to date.

FintechOS has raised $28m (about £21m) in equity and debt, with every equity cheque coming from investors already on its register, including Molten Ventures and the IFC. The London-headquartered company says it reached profitability in the first half of 2026 and has now raised more than $150m in total.

Veremark becomes the third technology company to use the London Stock Exchange's Private Securities Market, with a £6m secondary sale opening today and the auction set for 7 October. The background-checking firm raised $26m (£19.2m) at a $100m valuation in a Series B earlier this year.

Project Ventures, the solo GP firm founded by Shahryar Barati, has reached a £1.2m first close on its maiden fund. The vehicle will write pre-seed and seed cheques into AI and deep tech companies emerging from the Imperial College London ecosystem.

London's Unit1 Studio has secured $20m, close to £15m, in an oversubscribed equity round led by Balderton Capital alongside additional production financing. Existing backers Mercuri, Gilston Music and former U2 manager Paul McGuinness followed on.

The UK government's £500m Sovereign AI Fund is negotiating an investment in drug discovery startup Potential Sciences, in a round Sifted reported at £500m. Neither side would discuss terms, and the fund's head of ventures, Joséphine Kant, is reported to be joining the company as part of the deal.

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.

London-based certification platform Isometric has extended its Series A to $50m (about £37m) after Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, took a stake alongside nine other new backers. The additional tranche of roughly $10m (about £7.4m) lifts total funding across seed and Series A to $75m (about £56m).

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.

SCI Semiconductor has closed a heavily oversubscribed £5m round co-led by PXN Ventures and Mercia Ventures, both deploying Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II capital, with cyber security seed specialist Osney Capital, US firm Black Opal Ventures and private investors also participating. The Sheffield company has already booked more than £2m of orders and £7.7m of government contracts.

London-based CloudNC has raised $20m (about £15m) in new investment capital led by US firm Nimble Ventures, with Lockheed Martin's corporate venture fund LM Ventures, Calculus Venture Capital and Entrepreneur First all taking part. Neither the round stage nor a valuation was disclosed.

London-based Veridue has closed a $4m (€3.44m) pre-seed round led by Episode 1 Ventures, with HTGF and Pi Labs participating alongside angels including Aurora Energy Research co-founder Cameron Hepburn and former QuantumBlack chief executive Jeremy Palmer. The two-year-old company sells an AI diligence platform for renewables and data centre transactions.

PXN Ventures and the British Business Bank have extended NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance by £80m, lifting the North West equity fund from £100m to £180m and running its investment period through to 2030. The vehicle has already deployed more than £45m into 50 companies and pulled in over £50m of co-investment.

Molten Ventures has closed the first £175m of a £350m Ventures Growth Fund, with the British Business Bank writing a £75m cornerstone cheque and Molten itself committing the remaining £100m off its own balance sheet.

Chancellor John Healey will announce a £150m fund for university spinouts and startups across Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle. The money is being drawn from the British Business Bank's existing budget rather than added to it, and is intended to pull in private co-investment.

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.