What founders need to unlearn about fundraising and the one question no one thinks to ask investors Partner At SCALE Summit on 22 April, a panel of EIS and SEIS investors came together to share exactly what they look for, and where founders are missing a trick. Here are the takeaways for your next raise. Fundraising is usually talked about as something you do when you need money, as if it’s a phase [...]
Graduate start-ups require a new kind of office Partner The City’s future as an economic powerhouse is being driven by a new kind of graduate. In years gone by, the Square Mile’s leading financial services, tech and consulting firms have hoovered up university leavers from the moment they don their graduation gowns, funnelling them from campus to office. The next chapter in the City [...]
Making free trade a reality: The UK-GCC strategic dialogue Partner The UK-GCC Free Trade Agreement (FTA), agreed upon in May 2026, promises greater resilience to unprecedented rifts in international relations that would, until recently, have been unimaginable. In our previous analysis of this dynamic, prior to the signing of the FTA, we observed that the UK-GCC FTA was a response to troubling seismic shifts among the world’s [...]
Citroën 2CV returns as a £13,000 electric car, and the timing is no accident July 12, 2026 | Sponsored Citroën is reviving one of its most famous cars as a sub-£15,000 electric city car. It looks like a nostalgia play, but it is really a response to a gap Europe’s carmakers left at the cheap end of the market, one that Chinese rivals are now moving quickly to fill. Citroën’s decision to bring back [...]
New BMW M3: why the next one arrives as both a 1,000bhp EV and a petrol straight-six July 12, 2026 | Sponsored BMW has confirmed the next M3 will come in electric and petrol versions. It looks like a simple product decision, but it says far more about an industry still unsure what a performance car should be in the electric age. For years the industry told a tidy story about all this. Electrification would arrive, petrol [...]
Porsche’s Toy Story 911s prove luxury carmakers are selling stories as much as sports cars July 11, 2026 | Sponsored Porsche’s trio of Toy Story-inspired 911s will never reach a showroom, yet they may be among its most effective creations of the year. They show how premium car brands increasingly compete on cultural relevance as much as engineering. Luxury carmakers have spent decades convincing us that engineering is their greatest asset. The best of them [...]
Making it in the UAE – Donna Benton July 8, 2026 Donna Benton is not, in her words, “The stay-home coffee Mum”. After building The ENTERTAINER into one of the UAE’s best-known brands, taking it across more than a dozen markets and selling it in a nine-figure US dollar deal, the Australian entrepreneur could have stepped away. Instead, she built a portfolio across hospitality, fashion, beauty, [...]
London is Open for Business – But Only If We Get Planning Right July 8, 2026 Nearly seven years ago, Central London Alliance was founded on a simple premise: London needed to fight for its own recovery. At the time, Tony Matharu assumed it might take eight months. It has taken considerably longer – and the fight is not over. In the latest episode of London Talking, Tony sits down with [...]
The shift from black box to glass box in AI translation July 3, 2026 AI is transforming global business faster than most organisations can govern it. Few functions illustrate that challenge more clearly than translation. Content that once took weeks now moves in hours. Costs have fallen and multilingual communication now scales at unprecedented speed. But as AI accelerates, visibility is disappearing. Across global organisations, AI increasingly generates multilingual [...]
Carbon credits are moving up the boardroom agenda July 1, 2026 Over the past six years, climate commitments have quietly become a mainstream feature of corporate strategy. Since 2019, the number of Fortune Global 500 (FG500) companies with at least one climate commitment has tripled, rising from 24 per cent to 72 per cent. Collectively, these companies represent more than a third of global GDP. But [...]