You may be familiar with this scenario: faced with rising housing costs, you downsize and move into a smaller house. The problem being, you now have less storage space and you can’t surrender the essentials, like having a kitchen and a bathroom.

On the 3rd March 2025, Female Foundry officially launched its Female Innovation Index 2025, at an event hosted at Google. The event saw insightful panels, discussions around the stats that were uncovered in the report, and plenty of female founders in the room discussing what innovation meant to them.  

In today’s modern world we have countless daily interactions where we’re being served by a dazzling array of apps, websites, shops, and startups. From buying your morning latte at that artisan coffee shop on the corner, to snapping up a bargain top on the latest pre-loved fashion app or sending an invoice to a customer through your banking app.

While starting your business can be very exciting, your journey may be riddled with potential legal pitfalls. Navigating and understanding the legal landscape for early-stage companies will provide you with a strong foundation for your startup’s growth and avoid future disputes and potential costs.

Robin Bartmann’s passion and enthusiasm for mangroves is palpable. “I am fascinated by mangroves,” he admits with a grin. Bartmann is the COO of Vlinder in Kenya, an organisation that restores mangroves to combat climate change, enhance biodiversity and empower communities through fair carbon sharing and sustainable livelihoods. The project is designed to plant 4.2 million mangrove trees, sequestering approximately 911,660 tCO2e over a 30-year crediting period, with potential extensions.

Leadership is changing, and it's a shift I find truly inspiring. A recent Deloitte report found that 87% of executives believe we’ll face a strong focus on gender diversity in the next five years. That's not just a trend, but a necessity now, which only makes me proud, especially now, as we approach International Women's Day.

The field of finance has long been known to have a predominantly male presence, and when fintech came along, it hadn’t done much to change this state of things. Despite being built on the idea of innovation, gender diversity remained something that fintech struggled with. 

A new gender and diversity index assessing the state of play for the European deeptech scene has been released, developed by the GENDEX project and funded by the EIC. The index is intended to identify gender diversity and inclusion gaps across the ecosystem and to offer actionable insights and recommendations for stakeholders to consider moving forward.

The latest insight from The Global Payroll Association (GPA), reveals that the world’s 100 richest billionaires have a combined fortune of over $5 trillion, and that women account for just 15% of the list.

As many as 70% of UK leaders are optimistic about their business performance in 2025. However, fiscal challenges – including inflation (42%), high energy bills (36%), and high business taxes (35%) – threaten to derail this. This results in 76% of UK financial decision-makers saying they are experiencing unprecedented levels of pressure as they attempt to navigate macroeconomic uncertainties.

A sharp rise in AI-generated content is prompting global consumers to call for greater transparency from businesses, according to RWS’s global research. Over 80% of consumers believe that AI-created material – including text, images and video – should be clearly labelled, while 62% say that such transparency would increase their trust in a brand, according to research involving 5,000 consumers.

Nisien.AI a Welsh artificial intelligence (AI) startup based in Cardiff, has received investment from the British Business Bank’s £130 million Investment Fund for Wales via Foresight Group and the Development Bank of Wales, in a joint investment.

For decades, the boardroom has been a space of power, influence, and decision-making at the highest levels. But despite progress in leadership representation, women still hold just 23.3% of board seats globally. We talk about gender equity in the C-suite, in venture capital, in entrepreneurship – but what about at the top of corporate governance?

With International Women’s Day approaching, the internet will soon be flooded with posts about its significance. But in many countries, this global celebration of women has only fairly recently become a major calendar date. For many of us, therefore, it’s not entirely clear how best to celebrate it.

“First they say you’re crazy, then they fight you and then all of a sudden, you change the world.” So said Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos entrepreneur whose vision of a finger prick blood testing revolution ended up with investors losing millions and her imprisoned on an 11-year sentence for fraud.

The employment landscape in the UK is set to undergo significant changes in 2025. According to LinkedIn's recent "Jobs on the Rise 2025" list, which highlights the 25 fastest-growing roles, new job opportunities are emerging rapidly. From Artificial Intelligence Engineers to Partnership Development Managers, advances in industries such as artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability are driving the demand for new skills and creating job roles at an unprecedented rate.

The UK has dropped to 18th place in PwC’s Women in Work Index, marking its worst ranking for workplace gender equality in ten years. A ‘sluggish’ pace in closing the gender pay gap and declining female workforce participation have pushed the UK further behind its peers, now ranking second-worst among G7 nations, behind Canada.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has called for the UK to go “further and faster” on economic growth in the wake of recent market uncertainty. For businesses, particularly SMEs, this means navigating an increasingly complex financial landscape while tackling mounting challenges, from economic volatility to rising cyber risks. In turbulent times, one crucial yet often overlooked factor in securing sustainable growth is insurance.

Fiverr announces the launch of Fiverr Go, an AI platform that fundamentally redefines the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence, enabling freelancers and creators to grow their business exponentially while retaining full creative rights.

Needle, an AI-powered search and agent development platform, has raised $2.2 million seed funding in a round led by 468 Capital and Presight Capital. The funding will expand Needle’s engineering team, strengthen its core technology, and accelerate its go-to-market initiatives.