Entrepreneur Plus UK

Plum markets itself as a friendly AI robot quietly stashing away money on your behalf. It's a nice image, but it raises an obvious question: how does Plum make money if the entry-level version costs nothing at all? Strip away the AI framing and what's underneath looks a lot more familiar a subscription business with several different places it can charge you, depending on exactly which products you use. Plum itself names three income streams in its own profitability announcement: customer subscriptions, asset-based revenue on its investment products, and transaction revenue. That's the real answer to how does Plum make money not one clever mechanism, but several running in parallel, only some of which any individual customer will ever touch. Someone using nothing but a savings pocket on the free tier, for example, never pays an investment management fee at all. A Basic customer pays nothing upfront but faces the highest percentage fees on anything they invest; a Max custom...

  Nine centres, £1.6 billion in Innovate UK funding, and a network now being asked to prove it belongs in a rebuilt innovation system. Picture a founder somewhere outside Newcastle, three years into building a sensor for offshore wind turbines. She doesn't need a government scheme she needs a wind tunnel, or a rig that can simulate twenty years of saltwater corrosion in twenty weeks, or an engineer who's already solved the exact problem keeping her up at night. What is a Catapult to a founder like her? Probably nothing, until the day she discovers the UK already built exactly what she needs in a converted paper storage shed in Blyth, Northumberland and gave it a name straight out of a medieval siege. That's the first thing worth knowing: nobody sets out looking for a Catapult. Founders stumble into the idea sideways, usually after months of trying to solve a facilities problem on their own. So, what is a Catapult , in practical terms? A not-for-profit innovation centre...

  Curve's pitch was elegant: one card that stands in for all the others in your wallet. What it never advertised was that the maths underneath that convenience never quite balanced and that imbalance is exactly what led to the recently completed Curve Lloyds acquisition, after months of shareholder disagreement. So how does Curve make money, if the core idea tap once, route the payment wherever you like wasn't enough on its own? The short answer is that Curve built several revenue lines specifically to plug a structural gap in how its core payment mechanism works. The transaction that only pays half its own way Every Curve payment happens in two stages, and Curve only gets paid properly on the first one. When a customer taps their Curve card, Curve collects interchange income on what's known as the "Leg 1" transaction this is the standard fee card networks pay to card issuers, regulated in the UK and EU at roughly 0.20% for debit and 0.30% for credit transactio...

UK legal tech funding reached an all-time high of £189 million in 2025, a 35% jump on the previous year's record, according to LawtechUK's latest Investment Snapshot. The figures, published in February 2026, confirm what founders in the sector have been saying for months: legal services, long considered one of Britain's slowest industries to modernise, is now one of its fastest-growing startup categories. For a market built on billable hours and professional liability, that's a striking reversal. This piece looks at where the UK legal tech funding surge is actually coming from, which startups are leading it, and whether the momentum can hold through 2026. UK Legal Tech Funding Reached a Record High in 2025 Some 47 UK-founded legal tech companies secured funding across 2025, part of a wider ecosystem that LawtechUK now tracks at 315 UK-founded lawtechs up 17% from 270 the year before. Twelve acquisitions were completed over the course of the year, which LawtechUK'...

Global insurtech investors have been retreating for years. Deals over $100 million plummeted 85% in the first half of 2025 alone, falling to just $275 million from $1.9 billion in the second half of 2024. The sector's 2021 peak $16.6 billion across 867 deals now looks like a different market entirely; by Q1 2025, total funding had fallen to roughly $1.8 billion. UK insurtech funding hasn't escaped that pullback either, but it's holding up in a way the wider global numbers don't fully explain. According to CB Insights, 11% of equity deals into UK-based insurtech companies in 2025 went to startups ranked in the global top 1% by predictive success scoring more than double the 5% rate across the UK's entire startup ecosystem. In a shrinking market, UK insurtech investors are getting more selective, not less active, and they're picking winners at an unusually high rate. The global pullback, and what's different about the UK The scale of the global insurtech co...

Business insurance for startups UK tends to fall into one of two piles for most founders: either it's ignored until something goes wrong, or it's bought blind without any real understanding of what's legally required versus what's just sensible. Both approaches end up costing more than getting it right from day one. The risks an injured employee, a client dispute, a data breach don't wait for a company to start turning a profit. They exist from the moment the business starts operating, sometimes before it's taken a single payment. With over 800,000 new companies incorporated in the UK in the year to March 2025, that's a lot of founders currently making this call badly. Below are the ten mistakes that come up most often, along with what they actually cost to put right. Where founders go wrong on cover The instinct to treat insurance as a "deal with it later" line item is understandable cash is tight early on, and cover feels less urgent than prod...