Manchester's money: payments, antifungals and factory software

Ryft sells payment processing to businesses, and it does so from Manchester. It was founded in 2021 by Sadra Hosseini, its chief executive, with Alex Mackenzie, managing director, and Richard Kirby. Ryft says 6,500+ businesses now use the platform, and its customers include Epos Now, Chaiwalla and the Disasters Emergency Committee. Its October filings show £20.0m from a Series B led by Gresham House, with the existing investors Pembroke VCT and Ingenii Capital taking part, as Ryft's announcement sets out. The company's own headline calls it the largest UK payments Series B of 2026. Ryft also says it is certified as a PCI DSS service provider at Level 1. That suits a company that handles other people's card payments. Its valuation has more than doubled since the round before.

F2G, in Eccles, makes drugs for people with rare, life-threatening fungal infections. It began in 1998 as Functional Fungal Genomics, a name it later shortened, and its chief executive is Francesco Maria Lavino. F2G is plain about the difficulty: “Developing effective antifungals is a big challenge for science”. Its drug is olorofim, taken by mouth, and the company has been testing it with its partner Shionogi in invasive aspergillosis, a fungal disease. Phase 2b data, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, showed positive responses in patients with serious invasive fungal diseases. The Phase 3 trial, called OASIS, compares the drug with AmBisome followed by standard of care. Positive topline results from the Phase 3 OASIS study followed, and the full data went to IDWeek 2026 as a late-breaking oral presentation. A filing in October shows F2G raised £28.5m, the largest of the three sums here.

Oden Technologies writes software for factories. Willem Sundblad and Peter Brand founded it in 2014, after seeing manufacturers fall behind other industries in using their own data. The product tells the person standing at the line what to change. Oden sells Forge, a set of AI agents, and Process AI, which gives operators “real-time AI-driven recommendations”. The pitch starts with turnover on the shop floor: front-line operators stay three years on average and half do not last three months. Its customers include Teknor Apex, Westlake and Lake Cable. The company has offices in New York and in Altrincham, Cheshire, and it raised £7.5m in October.

The three companies share a city region and little else. One moves money for merchants, one tests an oral drug in patients, one advises operators on production lines, and each filed new funding in October, between £7.5m and £28.5m. They were part of a larger month. Region here means the registered office of each company. In that month 34 North West companies filed £188.0m of new funding, out of 609 companies and £1.76bn across the UK.

Learn more at bradshawdata.com. Corrections are listed with their dates.