Catalyst has announced the INVENT 2025 finalists, Northern Ireland's top competition for emerging innovators and entrepreneurs, where a total prize fund of £56,500 is up for grabs.

The INVENT programme, spearheaded by science and technology hub Catalyst and supported by Bank of Ireland as the headline partner, is the region's leading showcase for new entrepreneurial talent, enabling innovators to demonstrate their ideas to a panel of industry leaders.

Innovation knows no bou

ArcaScience, the AI Healthtech startup setting a new standard for benefit-risk evaluation to make better, safer drugs, has announced a $7 million seed funding round led by The Moon Venture, with participation from Pléiade Venture, Plug&Play Ventures, Bpifrance, and AKKA Technologies.

Joanna Jensen, award-winning entrepreneur and angel investor, today launches her inaugural book Making Business Child's Play: How to build a winning brand, essential reading for aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners who want to turn their ideas into successful ventures.

Dorset Business Angels next Pitch Event for Angel Investors  will take place on September 29th at the Bournemouth Carlton Hotel with 5 companies pitching for investment.

EnsiliTech, a Bristol-based BioTech startup, has secured €5.2 million in Seed funding to revolutionise the way life-saving medicines are stored and transported globally.

The round was led by Eos Advisory and joined by Calculus Capital, Empirical Ventures, Fink Family Office, QantX, Angel Investors Bristol (AIB), HERmesa, Penn Park Capital, chANGELS, and several individual angel investors.

Mantic, which builds AI systems for predicting events in the messy world of human affairs, including geopolitics, business, policy, technology, and culture, has raised £3m in a pre-seed round led by Episode 1, with backing from DRW and AI researchers at Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The company has come out of stealth with a team of AI technical staff drawn from Google DeepMind, Citadel, Cambridge, Oxford, and other AI startups.  

Holiwise the London-based AI-powered travel agency founded by Swedish entrepreneurs that is transforming how premium travellers plan and book trips, has raised £1.3m pre-seed in an oversubscribed round backed by senior executives from global firms including Bank of America, Barclays, Google, and Goldman Sachs.

The raise was led by Bobby Previti, Head of SSA & Covered Bond Trading at Bank of America, and joined by Ulf Nilsson, Nordics & Eastern Europe CEO at DHL, who is also joining Holiwise's board; Sabri El Jailani and Filippo Zorzoli of Barclays Investment Bank; and Houman Ashrafzadeh, Founder of Padium and Co-founder of Urban Greens.

Artificial Societies, a Y Combinator-backed AI company that simulates human societies, has raised $5.35 million in seed stage funding, including a $3.35 million seed round led by Point72 Ventures, and a $2 million pre-seed immediately prior with participation from angels associated with DeepMind, Strava, and Sequoia Scout. This investment gives Artificial Societies a healthy runway to turn a scientific concept into a transformative technology that benefits everyone.

EvaluateLocate, has completed a £300,000 seed investment round at a valuation of £2.75 million. The company is also simultaneously bringing to market its subscription app for the UK, the first territory in a planned global roll-out.

Riva Money has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding led by Project A and supported by experienced angel investors from companies including Revolut, Ebury, Monzo, and J.P. Morgan.

Riva's mission is to fix what's broken in global payments. Despite huge advances in consumer fintech, cross-border business payments are still slow, expensive, and opaque. Transfers can take days and often involve high fees, poor exchange rates, and little transparency. 

UK ocean intelligence startup NeuWave Technologies has raised £550,000 in pre-seed funding to tackle one of the offshore industry's costliest bottlenecks: inaccurate wave forecasts that stall projects and waste billions annually.

Backed by EHE Ventures' AI Growth Fund, alongside Insurtech Gateway and QVentures, the investment will fuel product development, commercial rollout, and key technical hires.

TRIFFT Loyalty has raised €550K in pre-seed funding to scale its AI-powered emotional loyalty platform. The funding is backed by Lighthouse Ventures, BD Partners, Gi21 Capital & Koopeo.