Simone D'Amico

2025 was a record-breaking year for UK tech. 56,615 new tech #companies were incorporated last year. That's a 17% jump from 2024, and 47% higher than five years ago. Despite economic uncertainty, founders are still betting on #UK. Here's what stood out: 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales saw 79% growth in tech incorporations 🏭 West Midlands up 27% 🚀 76% of tech leaders feel confident about growth 💰 UK AI sector hit £23.9bn in revenues 📊 AI growing 150x faster than the broader economy #London is still the biggest hub (27,164 new companies), but the real story is regional growth. Tech is spreading across the country. The trajectory is clear: the UK isn't just surviving as a #tech hub. It's thriving. If you've been sitting on a startup idea, the conditions have never looked better. Read the full breakdown 👇 https://lnkd.in/e_xEZnzA 🚀 Building a tech startup in the UK? Join The Tech Founders #community #UKTech #Startups #TechFounders #Entrepreneurship #AI #UKBusiness #StartupLife

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Should a payments giant be a database business? 🔥 Adyen is running multiple +100TB PostgreSQL databases in production and sending engineers to speak about it at PGConf EU and CERN PGDay. -Leading figure partitioning aligned across all tables. Wrong approach = 70x slower. Right approach = 70x faster. -PII compliance, data tiering, and archiving fall out naturally from the partition design. -Financial regulations met entirely with open source tooling. -The operational hazards of 100TB Postgres aren't a footnote — they're a dedicated talk. -The database design quietly becomes regulatory and operational infrastructure. Most companies eventually become database companies, whether they plan to or not. The real constraint isn't Postgres. It's engineering depth. 👏 Huge credit to Derk van Veen and Teresa Lopes .... both Database Engineers at Adyen ....for sharing battle-tested strategies from production at PGConf.dev 🐘 EU 2025 and CERN PGDay 2026. Great slides 👍 link in comments

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At Merchant Payments Ecosystem Berlin I had a short but very practical chat with Praful Morar, Deputy CEO at Payfuture. We talked about something many companies underestimate when expanding globally. His point was straightforward: pick a partner who actually knows the local market. It sounds obvious—but in reality, this is where most mistakes happen. You can have the tech, the product, the funding — but without local understanding, things just don’t work the same way. Worth a quick watch if you’re thinking about scaling internationally 👇 And subscribe to Fintech Garden for more conversations like this. #MPE2026 #Fintech #Payments #GlobalExpansion

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How much funding went into UK Tech companies last week? According to Deal Lite, a total of £310 million was raised by 22 UK technology companies during the period ending 1st March 2026. 1,841 tech founders, investors and suppliers to tech companies received https://lnkd.in/efmz5xBP this morning. Are you one of them? Some of the tech startups we reported: - Luupli secured £445k Pre-Seed Investment - congrats Degraft Osei Kwame Jnr - London based #HRTech, #RecruTech and #SaaS company Clstr (t/a Kinfolk), an AI Workforce Operations platform for modern HR teams raised £5.1 million Seed investment from AlbionVC, PROfounders Capital, Ascension, Emerge, Tony Jamous and Saurav Chopra. #uktechinvestment #funding #investment #tech #uk #deallite #techfunding #techinvestment #venturecapital #vc #seed #seriesa

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Spending a lot of time speaking with senior JVM engineers across London recently, and it feels like they’re in a really interesting spot right now. On one hand, the ecosystem is as strong as ever- especially across fintech and high-scale platforms. On the other, what companies are actually looking for has evolved a lot. When I first started out in tech recruitment, the conversation was much simpler: “10 years of Java = Senior Engineer” That was often the benchmark. Now, it’s very different. It’s less about: “X years of Java” And more about: “Can you design, build and scale real systems (and prove it)?” The engineers who stand out today are the ones who can think through trade-offs, own problems end-to-end and adapt quickly- regardless of whether they’re using Java, Kotlin or Scala. Feels like a much better (and more honest) way to assess engineering quality.

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UK SMEs are paying £150k-£350k a year for a full-time CTO. Fractional CTOs do the same work for £900-£1,600 per day, 1-3 days a week. But here's what nobody's talking about: most SMEs don't actually need a person. They need the outputs. Transformation workflows, AI integration, tech modernization. The stuff that eats up a CTO's time. We've been building this backwards. Instead of hiring fractional expertise, what if you could spin up an AI agent that handles the entire transformation roadmap. No hiring cycle. No dependency on one person's availability. Just on-demand intelligence that scales. The real play for SMEs isn't cheaper CTOs. It's eliminating the hiring decision entirely.

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Feels like something is breaking for a certain type of company. Multiple SaaS players we work with are trying to push through price increases by layering in “AI features”. I’m not sure they realise what this is triggering on the other side, but for the first time we’re seriously asking if we should just build this ourselves. (Just last week our CFO spun up his own HTML dashboard because our BI tool was too complex to learn. Cost didn’t even matter- Claude was simply better.) Isaac Timothy Tay had the more pithy take: time to short SaaS companies.

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AI adoption isn’t just for big business. SMEs across the UK are already leveraging AI to streamline operations, cut costs, and drive growth—but most leaders I speak to still feel unsure where to start. The truth? You don’t need a huge budget or a dedicated data team to see real results. You just need a clear, practical approach and the right guidance. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing actionable, no-nonsense tips on digital transformation and AI readiness—drawn from real projects with businesses like yours. If you want to understand what works (and what doesn’t), follow along or reach out for a conversation about where AI can create immediate wins in your business. Let’s cut through the hype and get practical about the future of your company. Message me to discuss your next step. Also image generated for a laugh and to take some abuse from my connections 😂

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UK retains Europe's fintech crown Financial technology firms based in the UK continue to be the biggest recipient of investment capital across Europe, but the wider fintech market is in a slump. European fintechs secured $2bn (£1.5bn; €1.7bn) in funding between July and September, a 42% drop compared to the same period last year, according to research from FinTech Global. Half of the 10 biggest third-quarter deals in Europe involved British firms, with the London-based Fnality ($136m) and Tide ($120m) raising the most. Still, total investment in the UK's fintech sector has dropped from $48bn in 2021 to $9.9bn last year, the Telegraph reports, citing data from KPMG .

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Pleased to share this one. We've just signed a development and support partnership with Openfield Education for their OpenTutors platform. It's a tutoring platform that handles discovery, booking, and billing. Great concept, built by people who clearly understand their market. gecco is handling the full technical delivery, hosting, and ongoing support. This is the kind of work I started gecco for. Real people with a real product who need a technical partner, not a sales pitch. Looking forward to working with Luke Field, Harriet Field, and the Openfield Education team.

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The best tech is like WiFi. You only talk about it when it stops working. Let me explain. In the UK, more than 9 in 10 eligible card transactions are now contactless. Most of us tap without breaking conversation. That shift did not happen because the interface became prettier. It happened because it became invisible. The same thing is happening with open banking. Millions of UK consumers now use account-to-account payments, and volumes have been growing more than 60 percent year on year. Authentication happens within your banking app. Confirmation is clear. The process feels familiar. For years, fintech focused on engagement. Bright dashboards. Push notifications. Micro rewards. But money is emotional infrastructure. People want reassurance, not stimulation. In 2026, strong product philosophy means designing for calm. Fewer steps and surprises with clear signals. When the experience feels effortless and predictable, users do not celebrate it. They trust it. And in financial services, trust is the real user interface. . . . . . #FintechUK #ProductDesign #UX #OpenBanking #DigitalPayments #ProductLeadership

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First up at LeadDev London’s new iteration #LDX3 we have Gergely Orosz speaking about what the reality looks like of AI coding. Starts off by addressing some of the “executive hype” around AI — it feels like everyone is trying so hard to sell it. Gergely spoke to a wide variety of engineers to understand what is really happening on the ground, from AI dev startups (like Anthropic) through to independent software engineers. Claude Code has seen usage grow from 40% at launch to 160% growth just weeks later. Talked with a bunch of folks at Google — everything is custom there! Even their IDE used to be a web tool, now it’s a VS-Code fork called Cider-V. They also have Critique for AI review of pull requests. “What I’m hearing from my SRE friends at Google is they’re preparing for 10x the lines of code making it into production” Amazon has Amazon Q Developer Pro, super popular internally for AWS. A year ago, it didn’t really work, 6mo ago folks were meh, now they’re using it a lot. They have an internal Claude as well off Anthropic partnership. If there’s an API it’s easy enough to just bolt on an MCP server; so Amazon are doing that left right & centre. Interviewed incident.io (woo!) who are using AI coding to accelerate their development. Shared some specific tips from their internal AI sharing Slack channel. Entire team now regular users of Claude Code even though just released recently. For balance, spoke to a biotech that is finding LLMs not super helpful in their niche. Building novel software. Independent software engineers who LOVE coding and love the craft eg Armin Ronacher who can’t believe how much he loves AI agents “Claude Code got really good — hallucinations avoided by AI running the code”. 🦄 Peter Steinberger feels we’re at a “just works” inflection point now, where a capable engineer can have a lot more output. Birgitta Boeckeler very thoughtful about exploring & understanding what works & doesn’t. Feels LLMs can be used at any abstraction level, it’s a lateral move across the stack. Simon Willison’s blog of over 23 years is now known as “the LLM blog”. Reckons coding agents actually work now, model improvements in the last 6mo have been a tipping point. [side note: Simon & I (Meri) were at uni together and he was already blogging then!] Still bunch of questions left! Not a slam dunk “the future is here”. 1) Why is it founders/CEOs so much more excited than engineers? 2) (missed it sorry) 3) How much time do we save when LLMs actually used? 4) Why does it work so much better for individuals than teams? “LLMs are not just raising the level of abstraction but we are getting used to non-deterministic outputs for the first time” Martin Fowler (rough quote sorry Gergely goes super fast with his slides!!) Kent Beck interestingly also super excited! Real tipping point again. “It’s time to experiment more with LLMs” is the real take away

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The UK Startup ecosystem has a major problem.⁣ ⁣ We’re encouraged to act like we have Product-Market Fit before we do. To raise money, we have to pitch as if our model already works. ⁣ ⁣ Then we’re pushed to execute - hiring teams, building departments, shipping features - without first proving our model is scalable.⁣ ⁣ But 𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 isn’t the same as 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠.⁣ ⁣ Most things won’t work, yet the system rewards activity over learning.⁣ ⁣ The result? Startups that look successful on the surface but are fundamentally broken underneath.⁣ ⁣ The fix? Stop building like a business before we’ve proven we have one. -- 👋 I’m Andrew Crump founder of Unkillable I post daily at 9:30am GMT about the secrets behind the best Startups. The magic I learned as an Investor, Founder and by helping 1000’s of them grow 🪩. Follow me for more!

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Revolut just stepped into the UK stablecoin sandbox. Yes, while still waiting for a full UK banking licence, Revolut has been selected by the FCA to test stablecoin products in a live regulatory environment. Let that sink in. This isn’t another crypto headline. This is regulatory validation. The UK is quietly building the rails for digital money, and Revolut is positioning itself right at the center of it. Stablecoins are no longer “crypto experiments.” They’re becoming infrastructure. The real question isn’t if digital pounds and tokenized payments go mainstream. It’s who will control the rails when they do. And Revolut clearly doesn’t plan to sit on the sidelines. #FinTech #Stablecoins #DigitalAssets #Revolut #FutureOfFinance

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Twenty-two years ago this month, in February 2004, Basecamp launched publicly - becoming the first major production application built with Ruby on Rails and proving the framework could power real businesses. Why Basecamp's launch mattered: Before Basecamp, Ruby on Rails was unproven for production applications. Critics questioned whether a framework suitable for toy projects could handle real business requirements. Basecamp's successful launch silenced doubters. The application demonstrated that Rails' developer productivity advantages didn't sacrifice performance, reliability, or scalability needed for commercial software. Rails extraction: Shortly after Basecamp's launch, DHH extracted Rails from Basecamp's codebase and released it as an open-source framework. This decision changed web development permanently. The extraction proved that Rails conventions emerged from real-world application needs rather than theoretical framework design. This practical foundation explains Rails' continued relevance 22 years later. Lasting impact: Basecamp's success created a template for Rails adoption. Companies saw that a productive framework enabling small teams to compete with larger organisations offered a genuine competitive advantage. The "small team, big impact" model Basecamp pioneered influenced an entire generation of startups choosing Rails for rapid development without sacrificing quality. Career perspective: Understanding Rails' origin story provides context for framework philosophy. The emphasis on developer happiness, convention over configuration, and integrated solutions all stem from Basecamp's practical needs. Developers who grasp why Rails works certain ways make better architectural decisions than those following conventions without understanding their origins. Basecamp remains a Rails application 22 years later, demonstrating the framework's long-term viability and 37signals' commitment to the Rails ecosystem. What Rails origin stories influence your development approach? We're connecting developers who understand framework philosophy alongside technical implementation. #Basecamp #RailsHistory #RubyOnRails #37signals #TechHistory #TechRecruitment

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Revolut pay goes Agentic... They’ve made Revolut Pay compatible with Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, getting ready for agentic commerce where an AI can handle the purchase for you. Are we ready for this? Are we ready for this to quietly show up in everyday journeys? The bit I keep coming back to is the idea of mandates. AP2 uses cryptographically signed instructions so there’s something concrete behind the user authorised this. Google talks about two modes of agentic payment: 1.- you’re there, watching the purchase happen 2.- you’re not there, and the agent is running a delegated task That second one is where I feel that banking stops being about making checkout smoother, and starts being about how do we make delegation safe for the consumer. If an agent can spend money for me, I don’t just need a prettier payment button. I also need to know things like .- What exactly did I give it permission to do? .- What are the limits (amount, merchant types, geography, frequency)? .- Can I see what it did, in plain language, after the fact? .- Can I revoke it instantly without calling support and waiting three days? Revolut also says they’ve helped adapt the protocol for account-to-account payments. If agentic payments become normal, it won’t just be cards in a chat window. It could be A2A becoming the default agent rail as well. A few questions I don’t have perfect answers to yet, do you? .- If an agent makes a reasonable choice that I later regret… is that fraud, a dispute, or just buyer’s remorse with better UX? .- When something goes wrong, who is accountable? the bank, the assistant, the merchant, or the user who delegated? .- What does good fraud prevention look like when the attacker’s target is the mandate itself, not the card number? My initial take is that agentic banking isn’t a chatbot problem. It’s a control problem. We’ll need proper guardrails, telemetry, and kill switches around delegated authority, or trust will evaporate the first time these flows get abused. Curious how others see this?

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A decentralised economy is a people's economy. Instead of following news about big business and their owners together with antics and drama, it’s better to focus on one’s own value accumulation. It is likely to accelerate through decentralisation. Most big businesses that people get crazy about get their money off the average joe that they keep in awe. #atomflow #tech #decentralization #economy

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💰 UK businesses are losing £10,800+ annually to payment processing fees Here is the math that will shock you: Traditional card processing: • £50k monthly volume • 2.9% + 30p per transaction (example figures only) • Cost: £1,450 + £30 = £1,480/month • Annual cost: £17,760 Pay by bank processing: • Same £50k volume • 0.5% + £1.00 per transaction • Cost: £250 + £100 = £350/month • Annual cost: £4,200 💡 Annual savings: £13,560 Plus you get: ✅ Instant settlement (no 2-3 day delays) ✅ 40% fewer failed payments ✅ Automatic PSD2 compliance ✅ Bank-grade security 💡 See how much YOUR business could save with Open Banking: 👉 paytia.com/pay-by-bank Download our FREE "Paytia Guide to Secure Bank-to-Bank Payment Acceptance" - 4-page comprehensive guide. #Paytia #PayByBank #PaymentProcessing #OpenBanking #CostReduction #UKBusiness

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