Bleap has announced a £1.8 million pre-seed round to launch a self-custodial payments app enabling customers to spend stablecoins 1:1 with a debit card, with no fees and up to 2% cashback on purchases.

Qminder has secured €3 million in seed funding led by Practica Capital - its first investment in Estonia from its latest fund and Qminder's first institutional funding. The round also included Jaan Tallinn's Metaplanet, BADideas.fund syndicate, and strategic angel investors from Toggl, Veriff, Pipedrive, Wise, and Twilio.

Bristol start-up, Good Boost, has secured a £150,000 investment from British Design Fund, as part of a £500,000 funding round, to accelerate the development of its world-first, AI-driven, aquatic rehabilitation technology.

Good Boost is aiming to transform swimming pools and community spaces into therapeutic places for rehabilitation, wellbeing, and healthy ageing. The company's unique digital aqua paddles make it possible to quantify human movement in water, aiding patient recovery and athlete conditioning programmes.

According to co-founder and CEO, Ben Wilkins, the pioneering technology is a game-changer for patients, physiotherapists, players and coaches, giving them the ability to analyse and evaluate aquatic rehabilitation interventions accurately for the first time.

Northern Gritstone has led a £4 million Seed extension into the Manchester digital X-ray technology company Silveray.

The University of Sussex Business Angels (USBA) group has backed a significant £1.1m fundraising round for cyber security SaaS platform, CybaVerse. USBA angels joined institutional backers including FSE Group, Haatch, Founder & Lightening in recognising the potential of the CybaVerse AI platform.

AllFocal Optics, the deeptech startup pioneering nanophotonic lens technology for always-in-focus images, has raised $5.3million funding, comprised of a $3.6million (£2.8m) equity raise, led by SpeedInvest, Innovate UK grants and business angels.

The new investment, combined with trials with Jaguar Land Rover, the addition of tech veteran Dr Ash Salusbury means AllFocal Optics is on track to be the first in the world to deliver ultra-thin lenses that recreates human vision for a better and more comfortable virtual experience.

adCAPTCHA, a new specialist security verification platform, has launched with £1m funding to tackle the ‘bots epidemic' and protect organisations against cyber fraud. The London-based company, founded by industry veteran and entrepreneur Alfie Scarborough, equips organisations with the capability to identify and block bots through its sophisticated in-house developed patent-pending human verification technology.

DSW Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of DSW Capital, has led a pre-seed investment into TheNextLevel, a Manchester-based innovator redefining mobile commerce through community engagement. TheNextLevel is pioneering "Community Commerce", allowing online brands to leverage the power of social commerce without being reliant on Big Tech.

Richard Hong, the cofounder of e-commerce personal care brand owner, Pangaea Holdings, and technology and logistics platform, OpenBorder, also contributed to the round. Elizabeth Gooch MBE, a prominent non-executive and angel investor, has joined the board as Chair.

Anaphite, which specialises in production technology for battery electrodes, has raised a $13.7 million (£10.4 million) Series A round. The funding was co-led by World Fund, Europe's leading climate VC, and Maniv, a global early-stage VC investing in the decarbonisation of transportation and digitisation of its value chains. A cohort of top climate investors also joined, including EEI and Nesta, with further participation from existing investors Bristol Private Equity Club, Elbow Beach Capital and Wealth Club.

Morphose Capital Partners has completed a further angel funding round for ‘EdTech’ Sherpa.  Launched in 2020, Sherpa Online provides high-quality, interactive online tutoring for learners of all levels, today offering access to over 3500 experienced tutors and having hosted in excess of 82,000 lessons in the last academic year (Sept 23-Sept 24).

USA: Platformatic, the cloud-native Node.js application platform, raises $4.3 million in its latest seed funding led by Rialto Ventures, with participation from existing investors Decibel and Panache Ventures.

The company completed an initial funding round in June 2023, which included a considerable number of angels including GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner, Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, major Node.js contributor James Snell, Tier.run founder Jevon MacDonald, notable Silicon Valley investor Walter Kortschak, and serial entrepreneur and investor Omri Barzilay.

This round brings Platformatic's total funding to $7.8 million.

Crowdcube founder Darren Westlake and co-founder Paul Rose have raised £150,000 from 230 retail investors, along with four angel investors who ‘cornerstoned' the round, for Disco, a new startup. The funding will help them expand their team and add more features for users to enjoy.