Perci Health, the UK's most comprehensive virtual cancer clinic, has successfully raised a total of £7.7 million funding, after closing a new £3 million round, doubling the original £1.5m target. This includes a £295,000 investment from Macmillan Cancer Support, further solidifying the charity's belief in Perci Health's mission

The entrepreneurs behind two of the UK's most successful hospitality tech businesses have joined forces to launch a new venture that aims to reshape hospitality recruitment.

Sam Brown and Nick Holroyd-Doveton have raised £785,000 to further develop their matchmaking platform, Candid Hospitality. The funding came from NPIF II - Mercia Equity Finance, which is managed by Mercia Ventures and part of the Northern Powerhouse Fund II (NPIF II), Haatch and an angel investor, and marks the first NPIF II equity investment in Hull.

Appacut, the UK's leading mobile barbering platform, has raised £600k in seed funding to accelerate its national expansion, led by musicMagpie co-founder Steve Oliver, who joins as Non-Executive Chair.

Glyde, the currency platform that empowers individuals and businesses to send, receive and convert money on their own terms, has secured £450,000 in pre-seed funding led by Fuel Ventures. The investment will be used to grow Glyde's engineering team, accelerate product development, and expand adoption across the UK and internationally.

Giles AI, which supports faster, smarter, and more compliant decision-making by delivering an AI-powered tool that enhances workflows in medical research, clinical trials, regulatory affairs, public health, CRO services and healthcare academia, has raised new funds via the FounderCatalyst platform, a cost-effective and rapid fundraising solution tailored for early-stage startups.

Antler Bio, an AgriTech company transforming dairy farming with gene expression technology, has announced a $4.3 million investment to scale its world-first EpiHerd system. Operating across key European markets including the UK, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, EpiHerd provides farmers with a unique understanding of their cows' health. Using advanced data analytics, the technology interprets how a cow's genes respond to its environment, detecting stress and nutritional imbalances, and helping farmers take proactive measures that improve wellbeing and increase milk yield, ultimately boosting farm profitability.

OutSee, a genomics and drug discovery company pioneering a unique AI-based predictive genomics approach to target discovery, has secured £1.8M in seed funding, led by Ahren Innovation Capital and with additional investment from Empirical Ventures, Kadmos Capital and Panacea Investment Group. The funds will support OutSee through the next phase of its growth strategy, with a focus on expanding the Company's in-house target discovery program and establishing new strategic partnerships with leading pharma and biotech companies.

The Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade has announced that £6.6bn of new capital is being committed by the British Business Bank to boost growth, marking a major step change in financing to support smaller businesses to start and scale in the UK.

Business angels continue to be a significant source of equity investment for start up and early stage businesses with 70% of angels investing in early-stage businesses. British Business Bank's Small Business Equity Tracker, published this week, found that two-thirds (64%) of respondents to the Bank's survey of UK angel investors have matched or increased their investments from 2023 to 2024.

Sweden: Swedish deeptech company Embedl has raised €5.5 million in a pre-series A funding round from Chalmers Ventures, Fairpoint Capital, SEB Greentech, Spintop Ventures, and angel network STOAF. After spinning out from Chalmers University of Technology, and kicking off commercial operations in 2022, Embedl has helped innovative startups and some of the world's largest corporates, such as Kodiak Robotics and Bosch to optimize their products' AI inference efficiency. With the new funding, Embedl will accelerate the commercialisation and launch of its SaaS platform, the Embedl Hub.

"A dinner conversation once led me to set up Abcam, a company that later sold for $6billion," says Dr David Cleevely CBE, telecoms pioneer, deep tech investor and innovation ecosystem architect. "Now, was that just luck, or something we can understand and replicate?"

In his new book Serendipity: It Doesn't Happen by Accident, David Cleevely challenges conventional thinking around chance and innovation. He argues that, far from being the result of random good fortune, serendipity (the discovery of valuable, unexpected outcomes) can be deliberately cultivated. And, with the right environments, networks and mindset, we can all change the odds in our favour - engineering serendipity instead of waiting for it to happen.

Blocktype, the residential planning platform helping to unlock the UK's housing pipeline, has announced a new round of investment led by Fuel Ventures to support the scaling of its data-driven planning solution. The pre-seed funding will be used to accelerate growth, expand partnerships, and support local authorities and developers in tackling one of the UK's most urgent challenges: building the right homes, in the right places, at the right time.