Yesterday’s Budget led on energy bills, fuel duty and wages. The Chancellor’s speech also touched on what happens when a founder sells their company.
From 6 April 2027, Founders’ Relief will apply a 10% rate of capital gains tax to up to £10m of lifetime gains for founders of high-growth, innovative companies. Without it, the top rate on gains is 24%.
Significant early investors can qualify too. The conditions that decide who counts, covering the individual, the company, and its growth and innovation, are out to consultation until 30 November. You can respond to this consultation by using the link we share at the end of this newsletter.
There’s a change elsewhere, too. From the same date, Business Asset Disposal Relief, which gives an 18% rate on qualifying business sales, will cover £500,000 of lifetime gains rather than £1m. The Treasury expects three quarters of claimants to still get relief on their whole gain. Its own figures show the two changes roughly cancelling out by 2031-32, when Founders’ Relief costs £300m a year and the cut to BADR raises £305m. The Budget says the BADR change keeps the focus on the early and scaling stages of a business.
Our co-founder and CEO, Anne Glover, had this to say: “The new founders’ relief is a welcome focus on founders and early stage businesses, but the reduction in Business Asset Disposal Relief creates a mixed picture for entrepreneurs. The test of this Budget will be whether the overall package materially improves the conditions in which innovative British companies can commercialise their technology, attract long-term investment and scale from a base within the UK.”
Our Venture Partner and portfolio alumni Stan Boland fits the description of the archetypal serial founder that the relief looks to support. He built Element 14, Icera and FiveAI, all with Amadeus backing, and sold them to Broadcom, NVIDIA and Bosch.
For employees, the changes are smaller but practical. The Company Share Option Plan becomes EMI2, aimed at companies that have outgrown EMI. From April 2027, each employee can hold options worth up to £120,000 under it, double the current limit. They will have 15 years to exercise them rather than 10, and the options won’t use up their EMI allowance. Claiming R&D tax relief also gets simpler, as the Claim Notification Form goes from 1 April 2027.
AI gets over £700m, and two parts line up with companies in our portfolio.
The £500m Sovereign AI Fund, which invests directly in UK AI companies, gets another £60m from 2027-28. It also takes on a new focus: physical and industrial AI, meaning robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing. Stateful Robotics, an Oxford spinout we backed earlier this year, builds a persistent model of tasks, environments and past behaviour so robots can plan further ahead and adapt when something changes. Slamcore uses AI and stereo cameras to track vehicles across more than 30 industrial sites, data the company sees as a building block for physical AI.
The Sovereign AI procurement scheme, which funds AI companies to work on government challenges, gets an extra £80m. Its areas include health and care, AI security and assurance, and warfighting. Safe Intelligence, an Imperial spinout, validates how machine learning models will behave before they’re deployed, using formal verification to find failures that standard testing misses.
Both are about AI that works outside the chat window.
Elsewhere, the British Business Bank gets £5bn more capacity. That includes £1.4bn for equity funds that back growing businesses and £450m for a new venture debt product open to defence and dual-use companies. The bank will also double down on its commitments to women-led businesses and funds to the tune of £200m, alongside a new scale-up programme for women founders. The High Potential Individual visa will cover graduates of the top 150 institutions worldwide. New legislation might stop non-compete clauses from blocking hires at startups and scaling firms, with details due early next year.
A few paragraphs in a long Budget, then. The conditions that decide who qualifies for Founders’ Relief are still being written, and the consultation is open until 30 November with responses are being collected now.
Read on for more news from our portfolio and partners across Intelligence, Human, and Planet this month.
Intelligence
Government relaunches part-funded security reviews for early-stage tech companies. The National Protective Security Authority and the National Cyber Security Centre will part-fund reviews for up to 1,000 early-stage tech organisations over the next three years. Each review covers governance, risk and incident management, security culture, cyber security, and supply chains. Each company pays £500 and the government covers the remaining £2,500. Apply through Innovate UK Business Connect.
Quantum data centres move towards deployment. Nu Quantum’s second Quantum Datacenter Alliance Forum brought together quantum, classical-computing, and data-centre leaders to discuss early commercial projects and the work needed to integrate quantum systems with high-performance computing and AI infrastructure.
Dialog-RSN-1 arrives on AWS SageMaker. PolyAI made its real-time reasoning model available through AWS Marketplace, allowing customers to deploy it as a SageMaker endpoint inside their own AWS environment.
Refute maps Baltic election disinformation. Refute’s Democratic Resilience in the Baltics report examined Russia-linked campaigns around elections in Estonia and Latvia, including cloned news sites, altered videos, bots, and multilingual distribution.
PolyAI appoints a new CFO. Former Rapid7 finance leader Sunil Shah joined PolyAI as Chief Financial Officer to lead finance, revenue operations, and capital strategy as the company expands its Agentic Dialog Platform.
NVIDIA partners with Riverlane. NVIDIA is working with Riverlane to explore faster calibration for quantum error correction. “Riverlane is using AI to help error correction keep pace with changing quantum hardware,” said Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA.
Refute sets out 10 recommendations for UK information defence. Refute and the Council for Countering Online Disinformation published Better, Faster, Stronger, covering regulation, AI-enabled detection, enforcement, private-sector resilience, and public awareness.
Riverlane explores faster calibration with NVIDIA. Testing on an NVIDIA H100 reduced one quantum-error-correction decoder training cycle from around three minutes on a CPU to 2.8 seconds, showing how accelerated computing could help decoders respond to changing quantum hardware.
Refute finds coordinated activity around copper. Refute reported that nearly one-third of South American online discussion about copper came from accounts it identified as inauthentic or coordinated, highlighting the information risks surrounding critical minerals.
PolyAI wins recognition for product and growth. PolyAI was named Best AI Tool at the Digiday Technology Awards and included in the Financial Times’ ranking of the UK’s fastest-growing companies.
NEOintralogistics expands with Conrad Electronic. After its first NEO system processed around 4.5m picks, Conrad ordered a second station before the test phase had ended.
Pimloc launches AI-powered transcription. Pimloc Transcribe converts sensitive audio and video into searchable, time-stamped transcripts, identifies speakers, supports translation, and allows personal information to be reviewed and redacted in the same workflow.
Sprout.ai reaches seventh in the InsurTech 50. BusinessCloud placed Sprout.ai at number seven in its 2026 ranking of UK companies using technology to change how insurance is bought, managed, and delivered.
Photon Bridge raises €10m for AI data-centre lasers. The Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital co-led the round to accelerate product development and customer qualification, with initial samples planned for 2027.
Pimloc helps Cleveland Police win a national award. Cleveland Police’s digital team won the NPCC award for Excellence in Productivity and Value for Money after a Pimloc Redact pilot reduced average processing time by approximately 85–90%.
iPronics appoints Daniel Pérez-López as CEO. The company’s co-founder and former CTO moved into the CEO role, while investor and semiconductor executive Geoffrey Tate became Chair.
Human
Ori Biotech expands its manufacturing partner network. Catalent joined Ori’s Preferred Partner Network, with its Princeton facility becoming an IRO Centre of Excellence for autologous cell-therapy process development and GMP manufacturing.
Constructive Bio appoints a Chief Commercial Officer. Dr Feroze Ujjainwalla joined Constructive Bio to lead commercial strategy, partnerships, and licensing for its new-to-nature protein and peptide platform.
iPremom advances MaiRa Predict with European funding support. iPremom presented MaiRa Predict at the RedIA Salud kick-off, its project combining AI with molecular biomarkers to assess the risk of early-onset pre-eclampsia.
Oxford Nanopore appoints a Chief Business Development Officer. Sebastian Kronmueller will join from Philips to lead strategy, partnerships, and business-development initiatives across diagnostics, genomics, and biopharma.
Planet
UniSieve raises $9m to scale industrial membrane technology. The Orano Venture Fund led the Series A, with participation from the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and existing investors.
Epoch Biodesign appoints Jamie Scott as Chief Operating Officer. The former INVISTA executive joined Epoch Biodesign to lead production operations and supply chains as the company develops its Spanish nylon 6,6 facility and moves towards commercial-scale enzymatic recycling.
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