As Pink Orange Media celebrates its second year in business, the agency has set out a bold pledge to donate a portion of all client retainers to global charities and provide employment opportunities to struggling job-seekers.

Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation for social good, and UK Research and Investment (UKRI) have announced a new two-year partnership to provide up to £6m in combined investment and grant funding for companies working to improve health outcomes in later life.

LOT Network, an international community of high-tech companies committed to protecting its members from costly litigation from patent assertion entities (PAEs, also known as 'patent trolls'), welcomes space tech startup company, Orbital Exploration Technologies (OrbitX), to its membership of more than 1,400 members. OrbitX is the first commercial space venture in the Philippines. 

Student and graduate entrepreneurs are receiving a £40,000 boost through Kingston University’s longstanding partnership with Santander Universities to launch and develop their startups this year.

Tally Market, the on-demand workspace platform for teams, announced that it has just closed a six-digit seed financing round. The oversubscribed round was funded by a group of prominent angel investors and startup veterans, and brings Tally Market’s funding to date to £330,000.

The 'NINJA Accelerator in Kenya' - powered by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), in partnership with Double Feather Partners (DFP), Deloitte Tohmatsu Venture Support (DTVS), Deloitte Tohmatsu Financial Advisory (DTFA) and GrowthAfrica - kicked off this week with a virtual event hosted in Nairobi, highlighting five high potential Kenyan ventures, a tailored but intensive programme, as well as a chance to take part in an international experience from Nairobi to Tokyo, and now Silicon Valley.

Claudio D’Angelo, former Co-founder and co-managing partner of Ryse Asset Management, has announced the launch of his latest venture - an investment management firm designed to help digital healthcare and medtech startups deliver breakthroughs in healthcare systems.  

Creative workspace and business accelerator, Huckletree has announced Yvonne Eruteya as its new Financial Director to focus on future growth plans, that will include new workspace products and further expansion across the UK and Ireland.

The Texthelp Group has been recognised with The Queen’s Award For Enterprise in the International Trade category.

London-based AI scaleup, Vivacity Labs has been honoured with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise. The Vivacity Labs team was awarded the Innovation Award for its technology that supports government, regional bodies and local councils to re-think and optimise the way traffic and transport infrastructure is built and used.

Suss Ventures has backed five investment deals with a combined value of £570,000 in under half a year. The new investor matching service is funded by Sussex Innovation, the business incubator owned by the University of Sussex. Since it’s foundations in 2019, Suss Ventures has welcomed over 100 investors and fundraisers into its growing community and has hosted quarterly events welcoming over 300 attendees, comprising investors and founders.

Sage has launched a peer-to-peer (P2P) customer service platform in partnership with Limitless, to enhance its customer experience and enable small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) to recover stronger as UK lockdown measures lift.

Record numbers of businesses are now using AI-based systems to hire and fire staff. And sign-up to these systems has sky-rocketed during the pandemic as more and more companies look at remote ways to recruit people.

Israeli Agtech startup, RCK, has announced the completion of the first ever catalogue of cannabis strains that covers all the medical indications of the Israeli Medical Cannabis Agency (IMCA).

The participants of this year’s RESPOND accelerator cohort have been selected: from approx. 400 applications from 65 countries, the ten best have been selected to participate in this year’s program. The five-month program starts on 7th June.

New research from PeoplePerHour, the freelance jobs marketplace, shows more people have turned to freelancing alongside employee jobs during the pandemic.

GoDaddy has revealed that a micro-business ‘powerhouse’ has emerged in the North of England during the global pandemic, with growth in new ventures outstripping that in the South.

Funding Options, the marketplace for business finance, has launched Funding Cloud, a technology and data-driven platform that will bring unparalleled scale and speed to the SME finance sector. Lenders including Just Cash Flow, iwoca, YouLend, Optimum Finance and FIBR have already integrated with Funding Cloud to benefit from its innovative technology and as a highly efficient channel for customer acquisition. By Q4 this year, the company expects to have more than 30 lenders fully integrated.

From better work-life balance and wellbeing to zero commute time, working from home is said to have more than a few perks. According to a recent study by Instant Offices, Britons who have been working from home have accumulated 1.2 billion extra hours which means a mammoth figure of £21.9 billion worth of unpaid overtime is lost.

Pauline Kwasniak from Female Event Planners, MCI’s director of onsite services, James Kelley, and Kathryn Frankson, director of event marketing at Informa, are some of the latest judges to be announced for Event Technology Awards (ETA) 2021.