The week in founders, 26 September 2026
This week
Google has settled a UK app developer claim for £260m. Of that, £160m is set aside for UK app developers who sold through the Play Store. No claim deadline has been published.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Ineos has mothballed three acetyls plants on Humberside, with 245 jobs affected and up to 1,000 staff at the site. The chemicals group says UK gas costs 12 times the US price have made the plants uncompetitive. Two have already stopped producing.
Angle Health, which sells level-funded health plans to small employers, has raised $200m at a $2.7bn valuation. It has 5,000 small-business clients and says it is profitable.
BrewDog's retail arm went into administration owing £2.4m in VAT and £489,000 in wages. Administrators AlixPartners say there is not enough money to pay preferential creditors, and unsecured creditors are in line for less than a penny in the pound.
The lead
Sprive raises $10m Series A seven months after £50,000 Dragons' Den deal
The mortgage app says it has 567,000 registered users and an £18m annual revenue run rate. Its round is a rounding error next to Britain's biggest tech deals this year.
Startup news
Unit1 Studio raises £20m to copy ABBA Voyage across cities
Balderton has led a £20m round in a London producer that says it can build avatar concerts cheaply enough to run them in several venues at once. No artists have been named yet.
Flock Safety offers buyouts to all 1,500 staff, deadline 2 October
The licence plate camera company, valued at $8bn, has put a voluntary exit package in front of every employee as cities cancel contracts.
Imperial alumni fund opens with £100k-£300k cheques
Project Ventures has launched a £5m debut fund for pre-seed and seed deeptech founders connected to Imperial College London. Three companies are already in.
Feather sells a $30,000 humanoid and invites developers to build on it
The startup is not chasing a general-purpose robot brain. It is selling modular hardware at half the price of its nearest Chinese rival and leaving the applications to other people.
Inspiring stories
School-run fumes led to a $50m electric bus business
Duncan McIntyre noticed a bus tailpipe level with his son's face. Eight years on, Highland Electric Fleets runs buses in more than 100 US cities and, on the company's figures, turns over $45m to $50m a year.
Tips & tricks
Lumox kept its WebGL site and added 41 crawlable pages
A Canberra software firm decided its animated website was not the problem. The missing second layer was.
Vercel cut its inbound SDR team from 10 to 1.25
The company's COO says home-built agents now handle 90% of inbound sales development and 93% of support cases, on an infrastructure bill in the single-digit thousands a year.
Six terms to pin down in a letter of intent
Founders argue hard over the valuation and leave payment structure, exclusivity and non-competes to be sorted out later. Later is when the buyer has the leverage.
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