The British Design Fund provided £230k toward a wider £400k raise to advance manufacturing and overseas expansion.
"The moment that changed everything for me was standing in a salmon processing plant and seeing thousands of single‑use EPS boxes piled up, destined for landfill or worse. It was truly shocking. I’d spent years in the seafood industry but witnessing that scale of waste in one place made the environmental cost impossible to ignore. I knew then that something had to change, and that experience has driven me ever since to prove that we can replace EPS with sustainable materials that protect both the product and the planet."
— John Farley, Founder and Chief Executive Officer
The Manchester-based startup will use the capital to expand its local team and accelerate growth in international markets.
"AI has made it easier than ever to start a business, but the real challenge arises when it comes to growing them. There’s a general understanding about what’s needed: more outbound, trying LinkedIn ads and testing more. But many simply don’t have the time to run this activity themselves, nor have the budget to hire a dedicated growth team."
The funding round was led by Backed, Lunar Ventures, Seraphim Space, MMC Ventures, and SOSV.
"I left my PhD because I was frustrated with the rate of progress in fusion energy. I wanted to take the strongest machine learning researchers in the world and apply them to these problems that really mattered, and a startup was the best way to do that,"
The London fintech closed its SEIS tranche in under seven weeks as it builds institutional-grade evaluation tools.
"We believe institutional investors need a much deeper understanding of whether an investment strategy is genuinely robust before capital is deployed. Historical performance alone can conceal overfitting, instability, deterioration and other risks. Atlas Prime is designed to give allocators a forensic view of those weaknesses and help them make better-informed investment decisions."
The Sunderland-based cybersecurity firm secured backing from Mercia Ventures and Northstar Ventures to expand its team and enhance its technology.
"Every business now gets asked to prove its systems are secure, usually by a customer who’s about to sign. The answer shouldn’t be three months and a consultant. We automate 90% of the work, fix the issues we find instead of just reporting them, and keep everything in place afterwards, which is the part everyone forgets about. That’s why we’ve doubled revenue in six months – because this problem isn’t going anywhere."
