iwoca has announced access to a £500,000 fund to help small businesses and employees build skills in AI and data analytics.

HyperHeat, the startup using renewable energy to make Zero-Carbon industrial heat, has successfully raised €3.5 million in a funding round. The investment was led by the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund with participation from Finindus, Possible Ventures, E44 Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Fellows, and a group of seasoned business angel investors.

A majority of UK business leaders (85%) feel that their productivity efforts are being held back, according to research from Celonis. Citing economic headwinds, employee stress, and difficulty implementing new productivity tools as the three core issues, these insights come against a backdrop of 57% of UK companies reporting turnover challenges in early October 2024, according to the ONS, and upcoming changes to employer’s National Insurance rates.

While tech giants spend years and millions building internal developer platforms, most engineering teams are left with a painful choice: cobble together fragmented tools or build everything from scratch. Spotify introduced Backstage to help address this problem, but even after years of availability, it still requires significant setup time and ongoing maintenance – an investment of time and resources that most teams simply can’t afford.

2024 has proved to be a defining year for startups, with generative AI stealing the spotlight and sustainability taking centre stage in business strategies. It was also a year of stark realities: economic uncertainty forced many founders to rethink their models, while heightened consumer expectations demanded innovation that truly delivered value.

Cell-cultivated seafood innovator Forsea struck a major breakthrough in making freshwater eel farming a viable commercial reality. The startup announced its organoid technology reached a record-breaking cell density of more than 300 million cells/ml, and with minimal and precise use of cultured media ingredients.

Startup founders often make high-stakes decisions based on instinct and experience, and these qualities can be the difference between success and a missed opportunity. However, when business plans are developed in isolation, they risk being too narrow, with unchecked forecasts and untested strategies.

H has announced the launch of Runner H, a first cloud-based web agent. With the beta release of Runner H 0.1, H is breaking through the limitations of plateauing scaling laws, taking a significant step towards artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Celebratix, a Dutch blockchain ticketing startup backed by Solana, has secured €1.1 million in investments from numerous Dutch serial entrepreneurs, the Swedish VC uBIT, and the UK business angel Justin Rees. The funds will be used to expand internationally. “We are beyond excited to set a new standard of blockchain based ticketing,” says Frank Roskam, Founder and CEO of Celebratix.

Red Bull Basement, the global event empowering a new generation of innovators to launch world-changing, AI-powered startups, has announced the teams set to compete in the 2024 final in Tokyo next month.

"This is the dawn of a zero-emission revival in waterborne transportation," says Gustav Hasselskog, Candela’s Founder and CEO.

US VC firm Voyager Ventures has launched a London operation in a vote of confidence in European climate tech companies.

Congratulations! You have successfully navigated the first steps of building your own business. You’ve proved the initial concept has a market and your business is starting to grow. You may have bootstrapped to date by using your savings or taking on investment from the support of friends and family. You may even be further along than this and going down the path of bringing in outside investors to help scale further.

Research by HR and payroll software provider Ciphr shows that most people significantly underestimate how pervasive the gender pay gap is in most occupations and industries in the UK. Ciphr commissioned a survey of 2,000 UK adults, including 1,188 employees, to find out how closely people’s perceptions of the gender pay gap (if any) matched reality.

Let’s state the obvious: public relations (PR) is a different beast for startups compared to large corporates. But as the news this week has shown (Jaguar), this is no bad thing.