Howard Kitto

A new Angel Investment Network (AIN) survey of 223 UK startups reveals the knowledge gap founders face: only 44% feel confident navigating the fundraising process. With tougher market conditions, bridging this gap is more crucial than ever.💪 We've highlighted some standout startup stats below for all founders 👇

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Lemon Raises £500K in Pre Seed Funding Round to Enable SMBs to Save Thousands on SaaS Spending Co-Founder and CEO of Lemon Matt Bird commented: “It’s clear that we’re going through a really interesting period for SMBs at the moment,. Taking into consideration the challenging economic landscape with funding drying up everywhere you turn, SMBs now need the tools and services to help them build better businesses as cost-efficiently as possible. With software being the third largest spend for an SMB, we really think Lemon can become a core part of how an SMB uses SaaS. https://lnkd.in/eHzkqN5v Koen Christiaens Edward Stevenson #fintech #finance #banking #paytech #payments #fintechnews #paymentsnews

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GET WELL SOON, a UK-based healthcare startup committed to helping patients access medical specialists and self-pay healthcare, raised £400K in funding. Midven led the round with the participation of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF). https://lnkd.in/d-pK8XSF

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After reaching a huge milestone, 200% overfunding, we will be closing our Crowdcube round early tomorrow. Thanks to all the new investors who have joined our journey - it's fantastic to have you onboard. If you had forgotten, and want to jump in before it closes, then you can still do so until 23:59 tomorrow: https://lnkd.in/ecqDfu65 Don’t invest unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you are unlikely to be protected if something goes wrong. Take 2 mins to learn more: https://lnkd.in/evf943Fk

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Mobile operators have a huge opportunity to tap into the booming gaming market, and EE is well-positioned to lead the charge in the UK through a strategic partnership with Roblox. Here is a bit of speculative: EE and Roblox: A Promising Partnership for the Future of Gaming Why Roblox? Roblox is a massively popular gaming platform with 79 million daily active users. The company has ambitious goals to capture 10% of the $180 billion global video game content market. By partnering with tech giants like Apple, Google, and Tencent, Roblox aims to become a major force in gaming. EE's Gaming Strengths EE already has a strong foundation in the gaming sector: - Promises low latency and ping rates that gamers love - Offers gaming console financing with subscriptions, trade-ins, and upgrades - Is now one of the UK's biggest console retailers Potential EE-Roblox Partnership Benefits An EE-Roblox partnership could be mutually beneficial: - Expand EE's gaming offerings: Roblox's huge user base and innovative user-generated content model could complement EE's existing gaming products and services. - Boost Roblox's UK presence: Partnering with the UK's largest mobile operator could significantly increase Roblox's reach and engagement in the market. - Drive 5G adoption: Roblox's immersive experiences could showcase the low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities of EE's leading 5G network. - Engage younger audiences: With its popularity among kids and teens, Roblox could help EE connect with the next generation of mobile customers. As EE looks to build brand resonance and relevance with consumers, a partnership with Roblox presents an exciting opportunity to innovate in the gaming space. By combining EE's connectivity strengths with Roblox's thriving content ecosystem, the two companies could redefine the future of gaming in the UK. #EE #VideoGaming #Roblox #Strategy #GTM Marc Allera Nick Lane

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Over the past year at the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Network we have been scoping out new working groups that will focus on Accessibility, Sustainability, Ethics, and ED&I in the #immersivetech industry. We ran several in depth industry consultations to determine if the network could / should play a role in addressing issues in these areas, and to see if there was a desire from the community for these groups to be established. The response was overwhelmingly positive. These are massive topics, and we have indentified several routes the groups could go down. We are currently looking for two industry co-chairs to help us lead each group and narrow down their focus & outcomes. As with all of our working groups, these positions are voluntary. Further information on how to apply can be found here: https://lnkd.in/eyN66z45 I’m personally very passionate about embedding this work into the network, so I’d like to say a huge thank you to Mitch Turnbull & Nina Salomons for leading the scoping work, and to my colleagues Amy Chao & Alexandra Jugureanu for helping to move things forward. #immersivetech #spatialcomputing #XR #VR #AR #responsibleinnovation #accessibility #diversity #inclusion #sustainability

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BeamXR secures £532,000 for XR streaming expansion “Our focus is on growth through enhanced community, so Creative UK, Innovate UK and our angel investors are the perfect partners to take us to the next stage, with ISN’s support hugely beneficial too.” Creative tech company BeamXR has secured £532,000 to “bring new levels of communication” and “exciting new social spaces” into VR gaming by enhancing its pioneering streaming software development kit (SDK), the first designed exclusively for standalone XR headsets. Find out more here: https://lnkd.in/ej2UBqah Craig Gilchrist Matt Hightower Henry Coggin Paul Miller Sasha Collington Daisy Rowland Charlotte Scott Creative UK Innovate UK Innovation SuperNetwork - powered by UMi The North East Combined Authority

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It was interesting speaking on a #TechUK panel yesterday for SMEs looking at government grant funding. Key messages: 1. It's a good option given how hard it is to raise from VCs in the UK at the moment 2. It's incredibly competitive, time consuming, 70% reimbursement only so think hard about going down this road 3. The process forces you to think in detail about your product so, at the least, you are future proofing your business Good luck to all the #founders out there. As Ed Bevan says, it's the journey not the arrival Research Innovate and Emerge (RIEm) at Brunel, techUK, Michael Joseph PhD, Geoff Rodgers

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I have spent some time formulating carefully my thoughts on this report. TLDR; A massively biased report that because of the bias misses critical issues that make its entire focus invalid. 1. The point made by the OFCOM Future of TV report is that the change is driven by consumer choice - which is not 'controllable', the decisions need to be managed. 2. The issue to be addressed is how to deal with the inevitability that the cost of providing a completely separate infrastructure to support linear consumers will mean that Broadcast is not financially viable at a point in time that is in our immediate future. 3. The report was targeted at driving responses from the industry on exactly HOW to manage the sunsetting of broadcast infrastructure in a controlled way, including an option that kept a cost (not profit) driven base minimum service to cover those who are slowest to make the transition, and to ensure minimum service to those who are left out of the IP transition. The option is not mandated as the number of those left out may be so small, that to run this minimum service may not actually make any sense. 4. The issue of cost is how to deal with the ADDITIONAL COST of running two separate infrastructures, where one is only for delivery of linear TV, and the other (WHICH WILL HAPPEN ANYWAY) covers all services, including ALL telephony from January 2027 (i.e. if you want a phone, you have to have broadband anyway by then). 5. Many of the arguments in the report are not expected to be an issue - e..g no one is suggesting that consumers will pay extra for IP delivered TV. In fact many of those arguments are based on an interesting problem that the largest cost of TV is the TV licence fee, that can be avoided if you do not consumer linearly delivered services, which is actually what is happening (currently I understand TV licence payment is at 81% of households and falling). 6. There is also a fallacy here that DTT has better coverage than broadband, driven by using an invalid broadband speed figure as the required speed to be able to stream HD video. Current USO figures of 10Mbps is sufficient for HD video streaming today, and the figures used assume the consumer is going to be streaming 4K or multiple HD services. A 10Mbps streaming service can provide you with single stream access in HD to all services, not just one Multiplex which is what is defined by the DTT 99% coverage figure. 7. Current USO is 99.26% of the country. 8. This is a discussion of how much more does the UK want to pay to run a dedicated infrastructure for only linear (which will only be 11% of viewing across both IP and Broadcast), and 20% more is too much in cost and energy terms for this. There are more points, particularly about the somewhat unbelievably (made up) numbers and invalid assumptions. This is a report targeted at finding an answer the customer wanted rather than a real assessment, even though the answer achieved is not valid. Discuss.

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After some very intense weeks of hard work the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Network team was proud to pull off the historic London XR Hack last week with our partners from PwC & XR Hack and their fantastic teams! After 3 very busy days, we had 41 impressive projects submitted across all of our categories. HUGE congratulations to all of our winners from Friday night! The event was highly competitive, and you should all feel very proud. Best Web XR App / Game (Sponsored by #Mattercraft) Winner: ARCADIA by Team 'Frontier' (Yiguan Liu, David Wiltshire, Kevin D., Petr Leontev, Michael Turkington) Utility & Design Category (Sponsored by Meta) Runner-up: IntelliSpace by Team 'Butter Chicken' (Xiaofan (Sylvan) Shen, Meghna Sonie, Girish M, Rimbik Das, Xinchan JIN) Winner: Habit Space by Team 'Novo XR' (Oluwatosin Ogunyebi, Shaka Tafari, Antonio Macedo, Jamila Kabir, Daniel Quental) Hobbies & Skills Category (Sponsored by Meta) Runner-up: Shufa by Team 'Linguistic Sense' (Mark Bamford, Qian Tan, Pablo Melchor, Haohan Cui) Winner: Pixel Prints by Team 'Block Dusters' (Setinaz Foroudi, Maf’j Alvarez, Javier Cabero, Varuni Sindunoori, Rangoli Mittal) Social & Casual Gaming Category (Sponsored by Meta) Runner-up: Battle Orb by Team 'MixRift' (Alexandru Dorobat, Liviu Focsa, Andrei Vaduva, David Pripas, Bogdan Hodorogea) Winner: Chaos by Team 'Fresh Do' (Lauren Fitzpatrick, Katie Eggleston, Mimi Harmer, James Hosken) Best Use of MR Stylus (A product not yet publicly available, Sponsored by Logitech) Runner-up: Habit Space by Team 'Novo XR' Winner: Shufa by Team 'Linguistic Sense' Best Experiential Education Experience (Sponsored by Pearson) Runner Up: Team 'RAVR' (Robert Chiru, Abhyuday Roychowdhury, Jack Underwood) Winner: Team 'Holosign' (Mark C Ransley PhD, Asan Amirov, Giulia Ferraioli, Marcus Connor) Best Female / Non-Binary Hacker (Sponsored by WiiT & XRDI) Winner: Chi Liu from Team 'Unusual Suspects' There is far too much to share about this event, and far too many incredible organisations & people to thank in one post, so watch this space over the coming weeks as we share more about the London details and announce what comes next from the hacks in Germany, Turkey, and Sweden! Good luck to our Meta category winners whose projects will be judged against the winners from the other locations for the global prizes. We wish you all the best of luck! #XR #VR #AR #AI #mixedreality #immersivetech #spatialcomputing #innovation #xrhack #hackathon #prototyping Innovate UK Innovate UK Business Connect

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With the UK healthtech market projected at £3 billion by 2025. Innovation is booming, and the next big breakthrough could be just around the corner! We’re a dynamic angel syndicate connecting visionary investors with healthtech pioneers to drive the next wave of medical innovation. We back early-stage healthtech founders solving the hardest problems in healthcare delivery. 👩‍🔬 For Startups: We’re here to fuel your journey from pre-seed to seed, with the funding, expertise, and network you need to scale your impact. 💼 For Investors: Join a collective of forward-thinking investors dedicated to transforming healthtech and medtech landscapes. Our Investment Criteria 🔹 Early-Stage Focus: Ideation to Seed 🔹 Sector Expertise: HealthTech, MedTech, Digital Health, and more 🔹 Impact & Scalability: Ventures with strong growth potential 🔹 Passionate Founders: Teams dedicated to meaningful innovation At Pulse Angels, we're more than just investors; we're partners in building a healthier future. Make sure to follow this page for further updates! #HealthTech #MedTech #DigitalHealth #Innovation #StartupFunding #AngelInvestors 

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This Automated Analytics event and code of practice is a key step in how we in the sector can ensure trust in #AI here in the UK….

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