Tech

BT Group spent the weekend negotiating with Ares Management, the largest lender to TalkTalk, which has put more than £380m into the broadband group since 2024. Ares is reported to want either an upfront payment or control of TalkTalk's retail arm, which serves about 1.7 million customers.

The Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult has relaunched as the Semiconductor Catapult. It will now support AI hardware and defence chip companies from sites in Newport, Bristol and Glasgow, under a £1.1bn plan that includes £150m for buying chips from UK startups.

London-based Reactive Technologies has secured €19m in venture debt from the European Investment Bank, with up to €7m earmarked for research in Finland and the remaining €12m for deploying its GridVerix platform across the EU.

Buyout firm Epiris is in formal talks to buy PXC, TalkTalk's wholesale arm, for about £200m. Combined with a £100m bid for the consumer business, TalkTalk's two divisions would raise roughly £300m, set against a £2bn valuation including debt when the group went private in 2021.

Monzo is in early-stage talks with Brazil's Nubank over a deal that could value the London digital bank at £8bn to £10bn, up to 2.2 times the £4.5bn price set in its October 2024 employee share sale. The board is weighing a sale against a fresh funding round at more than £8bn.

London early-stage investor Connect Ventures has closed $55m towards an $80m fifth fund, anchored by the British Business Bank. The vehicle will lead pre-seed rounds across Europe with cheques of $500,000 to $5m, with a focus on technical founding teams.

MSPs have rejected the Scottish Greens' call for a formal moratorium on hyperscale data centres but passed SNP and Labour amendments that pause determinations on new large-scale applications until national planning guidance is published, promised by the end of 2026. More than 20 Scottish data centre projects are at some stage of development.

London-based Big Picture Bio has emerged from stealth with £2.2m, split between a £1.5m pre-seed equity round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures and £700k of non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK. The company is building generative models to design cancer combination therapies.

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.

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.

Uber has opened bookings for Wayve-operated autonomous vehicles in London from today, making the London-based startup the first robotaxi operator to carry public passengers in the capital. Wayve closed a $1.5bn Series D in February at an $8.6bn post-money valuation, with Uber itself on the cap table.

London movement-intelligence startup HITAI has acquired the technology and intellectual property of Quell, the UK fitness gaming developer that raised a $10m (€8.63m) Tencent-led Series A in 2023 and counted Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures and Heartcore Capital among its backers. Terms were not disclosed.

System1's board has unanimously rejected a third takeover offer from Brave Bison, which values the AIM-quoted market research firm at about £43.1m and comes from a bidder that already owns 28% of its shares. The board says the offer document carries no irrevocable undertakings or letters of intent from any System1 shareholder.

London-headquartered Nscale has agreed a six-year contract worth about $45bn to rent out AI computing capacity, weeks before a US listing in which the two-year-old company is seeking as much as $3bn. Total contracted revenue shown to prospective investors now stands at roughly $51bn.

British robotics companies have raised $258m (£189.3m) across 12 rounds so far in 2026, already ahead of the $150m (£110m) banked across the whole of 2025, according to Tracxn. Two deals account for 76% of the total.

UK Research and Innovation has opened a £28m grant competition under its Ultra-Long Duration Energy Storage challenge, inviting UK innovators to bid for non-dilutive capital to develop batteries that run for more than 100 hours and systems that store hydrogen underground.

Austrian propulsion manufacturer ENPULSION has agreed to acquire the entire share capital of UK chemical propulsion specialist Lift Me Off. Terms were not disclosed, and completion is subject to clearance under the National Security and Investment Act 2021.

UK enterprise data company Prevalent AI has secured a $22m (roughly £16m) growth investment from Los Angeles-based Integrity Growth Partners — the first new money onto its balance sheet since the business was founded in 2017.

DataVita has raised a debt facility of about £300m to expand and build two data centres in the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, underwritten by a £202m guarantee from the National Wealth Fund. Every megawatt of capacity is contracted to CoreWeave on a 15-year lease.

Northern Gritstone, the £382m spinout investor founded by the universities of Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, is opening a Bay Area office to bring American money onto the cap tables of its roughly 50 portfolio companies. Only five of them currently have a US investor on the register.

TalkTalk Business and IT services provider ARO have agreed to merge, forming an independent connectivity and managed technology company with £200m in annual revenues, roughly 650 staff and more than 70,000 business and public sector customers across the UK.

Portsmouth maritime technology firm SubSea Craft has acquired a 40% equity interest in Coventry battery developer LORILLION in a multi-million-pound investment, funding a headcount push to more than 70 engineers and a new Midlands production facility due to open in 2027.

Duolingo, the Nasdaq-listed language-learning company, has acquired Animade, a London-based animation and motion design studio, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The purchase folds Animade's team into Duolingo's in-house design studio and expands the US firm's creative footprint in the UK.

UK semiconductor companies have raised $321m (£237.4m) so far in 2026, overtaking the £193.8m recorded across the whole of 2025, according to Tracxn data. The gains are concentrated in early-stage rounds and in a single Bristol-led hub, even as late-stage cheques and exits dry up.

Leeds-based Radar Healthcare has acquired patient experience and outcomes platform Cemplicity, its second bolt-on acquisition in short order, as the Marlin Equity Partners-backed group builds out its healthcare quality and safety software. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Turntide Technologies has been selected for a £17m UK government-backed grant project to accelerate volume production of its axial-flux electric motors, in a non-dilutive capital injection aimed at anchoring high-power motor manufacturing in the North East of England.

The government has earmarked £65m for electric-vehicle projects led by Bentley and Nissan under its DRIVE35 programme, with £50m of public money to be matched by industry, in a package it says will support 1,800 jobs as UK car production sits at a 70-year low.

London-based Alfa AI has closed a £1m seed round led by Sake Bosch to scale its AI-powered recruitment platform, and has appointed former Dragons' Den investor James Caan CBE as a strategic adviser.

UK autonomous vehicle company Oxa has partnered with Dubai Future Foundation to launch SHIFFT, a joint venture focused on deploying autonomous mobility technology across industrial environments. The project will initially target ports, airports and high-throughput logistics operations, with commercial rollout planned for late 2027.

The UK Space Agency will inject £62m into British satellite and space-innovation projects, unveiled at the Farnborough International Airshow by space minister Liz Lloyd, with £42m earmarked for satellite communications and £20m for early-stage innovation.