PXN Group

Thanks to Turing Fest for hosting the PXN team this week. David Foreman spoke alongside Henry Whorwood, Benjamin Storey and Nathalie Cutting to a closed group of investors about the opportunities in the Scottish venture ecosystem. Thanks for hosting, Barclays UK! Andrew Noble also hosted an investor and portfolio dinner with the team at Ada Ventures, discussing how we can back more exceptional talent and companies coming out of Scotland. If you were there, you may also have spotted Alastair Moore. He was out speaking to founders from across Scotland and the North of the UK over the two days. Thanks again to the Turing team! Looking forward to next year already.

✨ Welcome to the PXN Growth VCT portfolio, MAGIC AI! Our newest PXN Growth VCT portfolio company is leading a major innovation in gym and home workout technology with its MAGIC AI Mirror, which merges computer vision with holographic coaching to deliver real-time feedback and personalised workouts at home. Its proprietary ReflectAI® technology tracks motion, corrects form, counts reps and coaches users through more than 1,000 exercises. The MAGIC AI Mirror, named one of TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2024 and a recipient of The King's Awards for Enterprise title in the Innovation category in 2026, also counts several celebrities as coaches. Among them former England cricket captain Sir Alastair Cook and Strictly Come Dancing's Katya Jones, who appear as "hologram" personal trainers, morphed by generative AI and computer vision to allow them to coach and respond in real time in users' living rooms. MAGIC AI has had an exceptional growth journey, including being named the fourth fastest-growing hardware company by The Sunday Times, posting 342% annual growth, as well as being named one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies after ranking No.21 out of 1000 on the Financial Times’ FT1000 list. We're very excited to be supporting co-founder and CEO Varun Bhanot and the wider team as they scale, with MAGIC AI looking to build on its success in the UK with further US expansion as well as developing the product even further. 🗞️ Check out the full story via The Times: https://lnkd.in/e7fiY3be

🤔 What are the next steps for the Northern Growth Corridor? From transport and productivity to investment, our PXN Group CEO David Foreman will be joining a host of special guests on October 16th to take part in an online conference hosted by the Westminster Social Policy Forum branch of Westminster Forum Projects, which will seek to discuss this very subject. This will be a wide-ranging conference, connecting local council leaders and key stakeholders, including Nick Bisson (Director, Northern Powerhouse Rail and Network Planning, Department for Transport (DfT), United Kingdom. Topics will range from the government's industrial strategy and the success of the region's many growth clusters to improvements to rail links and other upcoming projects, all against the backdrop of the Northern Growth Strategy. We're looking forward to taking the part and making the case for the role major investors, such as PXN, can play in the growth of our Northern regions, particularly through institutions such as the British Business Bank, which we're closely aligned to as the North West fund manager for NPIF II. 📆 If you're interested in attending and want to hear more, you can do so by heading to the website, with bookings now open: https://lnkd.in/e7TFXvnc

More news!⚡️ Welcome to the PXN portfolio, Expanse! Expanse is helping to address one of the core issues facing AI engineers – accurately estimating compute requirements before execution.   Every AI workload begins with uncertainty. Engineers must estimate GPU/CPU count, memory requirements, and runtime before their code runs. The industry estimates that 30% of cloud spend is wasted through over-allocation.   Expanse's software removes that guesswork by determining what an AI workload requires before execution, enabling organisations to utilise their existing infrastructure more effectively and eliminate wasted spend.   The company – part of Y Combinator’s spring 2026 batch – was founded by Ismaeel Bashir, Nikodem B., Eren Mendi and Yafet Melake, four University of Edinburgh graduate engineers from the world-class School of Informatics.   We're proud to have participated in Expanse's $5.3m seed funding round, and we're looking forward to supporting the team as it expands into new markets across AI infrastructure, quantitative finance, life sciences, research and high-performance computing.   🗞️ A big thank you to Andy Barrow, Alastair Moore and Harry Manley for all their work on this deal. Read the full story here via DIGIT.FYI: https://lnkd.in/da8XGWKA

More news!⚡️ Welcome to the PXN portfolio, Expanse! Expanse is helping to address one of the core issues facing AI engineers – accurately estimating compute requirements before execution.   Every AI workload begins with uncertainty. Engineers must estimate GPU/CPU count, memory requirements, and runtime before their code runs. The industry estimates that 30% of cloud spend is wasted through over-allocation.   Expanse's software removes that guesswork by determining what an AI workload requires before execution, enabling organisations to utilise their existing infrastructure more effectively and eliminate wasted spend.   The company – part of Y Combinator’s spring 2026 batch – was founded by Ismaeel Bashir, Nikodem B., Eren Mendi, and Yafet Melake, four University of Edinburgh graduate engineers from the world-class School of Informatics.   We're proud to have participated in Expanse's $5.3m seed funding round, and we're looking forward to supporting the team as it expands into new markets across AI infrastructure, quantitative finance, life sciences, research and high-performance computing.   🗞️ A big thank you to Andy Barrow, Alastair Moore, and Harry Manley for all their work on this deal. Read the full story here via DIGIT.FYI: https://lnkd.in/da8XGWKA

🎾 Delighted to announce The Padel Club has raised a further £3m from NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance as it continues its UK-wide expansion! The news follows The Padel Club launching its new Handforth Dean club in Cheshire earlier this month – the first of eight new clubs with Chester, Liverpool, Knutsford, Sheffield, Cardiff, Brighton and Sutton Coldfield in Birmingham all coming next. Since our initial NPIF II investment two years ago, The Padel Club has been serving up its share of success, launching sites at TraffordCity, Gloucester Quays and Cheltenham as well as driving approximately 100% revenue growth in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year. In that time, padel's popularity has also continued to grow, with 860,000 adults and juniors playing the sport at least once last year. Our continued backing of the Wilmslow-founded company also coincides last week's announcement of an £80m extension to NPIF II – PXN Equity Finance, taking the fund to £180m and giving us more capital to find and fund great North West businesses. Congratulations to Kristopher Ball and the team on their ongoing success, and a big thank you to the British Business Bank for their continued support. 🗞️ Check out the full story via Insider Media: https://lnkd.in/eUbTq2x9

"It's already sorted."   Most advisers have heard that sentence about a client's estate plan, often about Business Relief. Join us tomorrow morning and we'll look at why those plans are worth taking a look at.   Most advisers can handle the technical side of this. The awkward bit is going back to a client who filed this away as done years ago and telling them it needs another look, without it landing as though you got it wrong first time round.   Caroline Flagg of PXN Group joins us for 45 minutes on: - What the changes mean in practice  - The opportunity - which clients you should be speaking with today - Where Business Relief earns its place - How to raise it with a client who thinks it's done Tuesday 15 September, 11am. Last chance to join live: https://lnkd.in/eZGWjUcz

⚽️ PXN's football team did us proud on Friday at the annual Praetura charity football tournament. The PXN team joined 22 teams from across Greater Manchester and Lancashire to raise money for #ANDYSMANCLUB. Shout out to Ben Hemingway, Ben Collister, Kieran O'Shaughnessy, Matthew Chan, Josh Kumwenda, and Harry Manley for their efforts. ANDYSMANCLUB are a men’s suicide prevention charity, offering free to attend peer-to-peer support groups across the United Kingdom and online. For those struggling with their mental health, you can find out more via their website - https://lnkd.in/dZk9TKA If you can spare a few pounds to support their work, you can also donate here: https://lnkd.in/eVybnZMz

Scotland produces world-leading science. Too often, someone else builds the world-leading company. As a country, we have more top-tier universities per capita than any other country in the world. Our universities create exceptional research, intellectual property (IP) and technical talent. Scottish universities secure twice the UK average in deeptech research income per capita, but receive a third less venture investment. That gap matters. Without sufficient capital from spinout to scale-up, promising technologies remain in the lab, ambitious companies look elsewhere to grow, and IP developed here becomes someone else’s commercial success. At PXN Ventures Scotland, we’ve spent nearly two decades backing breakout technology companies and university spinouts in the North of the UK. We know Scotland has the ideas, founders and expertise to build globally significant businesses. We've seen it first-hand. What it needs is more capital, delivered earlier and with greater conviction and specialist support. PXN's Andrew Noble explains why the UK must get better at turning world-leading science into world-beating companies—and why Scotland should be central to that ambition. Read the full article in LBC: https://lnkd.in/e9nvYVdb