James

I was too young to rent a van. Too young for a business credit card. Too young for the client across the table to take me seriously. I started a business anyway. Most "young entrepreneur" content is written by people who want to inspire you. This isn't that. This is the article I needed when I was starting out and couldn't find, because everyone was too busy posting motivational quotes on Instagram to tell me the bank would reject my application three times, clients would ask to speak to my manager (I was the manager), and my mum would ask me every Sunday for roughly eighteen months whether I'd "thought about getting a proper job." The VanI needed to move equipment for an early project. Rent a van. Drive to the location. Simple. Except most van hire companies in the UK won't rent to under-25s. Some won't rent to under-23s. The ones that do charge a young driver surcharge that roughly doubles the price. I stood in the hire office while a man behind the counter explained, very slowly, like I might not understand English, that I was too young to be trusted with a Transit van. I had a registered business. I had a client waiting. I had insurance. I did not have a birth certificate that said a number he found acceptable. That hire office was my introduction to something nobody warns young founders about. The entire business infrastructure of this country was built for people who are older than you. Banks, insurers, landlords, hire companies, suppliers, clients. All of them have systems, policies, or prejudices that assume the person running a business is at least 30, probably 40, and definitely not someone who was doing their GCSEs five years ago. You don't read about this in startup guides because the people writing startup guides are 42 and have never had this problem. The Bank Said No. Three Times.Opening a business bank account should be straightforward. Register your company. Walk into a bank. Open an account. First application: rejected. "We are unable to offer you an account at this time." No reason. No appeal process. Just no. Second application, different bank: rejected. Business "too new." I'd been trading for three months. They wanted twelve. How you trade for twelve months without a business bank account was a question nobody at the bank could answer. I asked. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I'd asked her to explain gravity. She didn't have an answer. Neither did the system she was following. Third bank said yes. A digital bank. Not a high street one. I nearly cried in my kitchen. It actually happened to be Starling! That sentence tells you everything about what the process does to your confidence as a young founder. You start the day thinking "I'm building a business" and end it thinking "I can't even open a bank account." Maybe mum's right about the proper job. Maybe I'm not ready. Maybe the system knows something I don't. It doesn't. The system just wasn't built for you. There's a difference between not being ready and not being expected. Young founders experience the second one constantly and mistake it for the first. If you're under 25 and reading this: go digital first. Starling, Tide, or Monzo Business. Days rather than weeks. Fewer arbitrary rejections. Don't let a bank clerk with a checklist convince you that you're not ready to run a business. "Oh. I Thought You'd Be... Older."The first time it happened in person was the worst. I walked into a meeting with a potential client. I was early twenties. He was mid-fifties. He looked at me, looked behind me as if expecting someone else to follow, and said those words. Not rude, exactly. Just surprised that the person who'd been sending professional emails and delivering competent proposals was someone who looked like his son's university friend. I didn't get the contract. There were others. "Can I speak to your manager?" on the phone. "Could you put me through to someone more senior?" in emails. I was the most senior person. I was the only person. The entire company was me, a desk from Facebook Marketplace, and a shirt I'd ironed specifically for this video call. I'd love to tell you I handled it with grace. I didn't. Each one chipped away. Each one fed the imposter syndrome that was already running riot. Each one made me consider putting "15 years of experience" on my website just to stop people being surprised when I turned up looking like I'd just finished sixth form. I didn't fake anything. But I understand why some young founders do. When the world tells you repeatedly that you're not what it expected, the temptation to become what it expected is enormous. Resist it. Not because honesty is a virtue (though it is). Because the clients who need you to be older to trust you are the clients who'll find another reason not to trust you later. Age was never the real objection. It was the convenient one. Sunday LunchFor roughly eighteen months, every Sunday at my parents' house: Mum: "So how's the business going?" Me: "Good, yeah. Got a new client this week." Mum: "That's nice, love. Have you thought about what you'd do if it doesn't work out?" Me: Dies just a little bit more each time. Every week. Eighteen months. My mum wasn't being unsupportive. She was being a mum. She'd watched me turn down a graduate scheme to pursue something she didn't fully understand. All she saw was her kid working constantly, earning inconsistently, and looking tired. A "proper job" with a salary and a pension and a boss who'd tell me when to go home was the safer option. She wasn't wrong about the safety. She was wrong about what safety costs. What I couldn't explain, because I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, was that the uncertainty of building something was less painful than the certainty of building someone else's thing. Employment felt safe. It also felt like slow suffocation. I still would. That feeling hasn't changed. I just have better words for it now. Mum eventually stopped asking about the proper job. She tells her friends about Startup Networks now with the kind of pride that makes me think she's forgiven me for the eighteen months of worry. Probably. I should ask her. If your parents are doing the same thing to you right now, try to hear the love underneath the doubt. They're not trying to crush your dream. They're trying to protect their kid. Those are different things, even when they feel identical over roast potatoes. The Part About Money That I Don't Want to WriteI'm going to write it anyway because someone needs to. I didn't have savings. Not real savings. Not "I can survive six months without revenue" savings. I had "I can cover rent for two months and then I'm in trouble" savings. Every client payment was the difference between paying bills and not paying bills. Not in the abstract. In the "will my card decline at Tesco" sense. There was a month where a client paid an invoice three weeks late. Three weeks. For them, an admin delay. For me, three weeks of checking my bank balance every morning with a feeling in my chest I can only describe as controlled panic. I couldn't chase too aggressively because I needed the client. I couldn't ignore it because I needed the money. So I refreshed my banking app. At 8am. At 8:07am. At 8:15am. As if the number was going to change because I wanted it to. The invoice got paid. I paid my rent. Life continued. That three weeks aged me about two years. Older founders with mortgages will tell me they have financial pressure too. They do. But there's a specific vulnerability to being young and broke and self-employed that comes from having no cushion. No credit history to fall back on. No parents who can casually lend you five grand. No prior career earnings to draw from. Not "I left a £60K job and have savings" zero. "I have £847 in my account and rent is £750" zero. Here's what I wish someone had told me: keep a side income running alongside the business for as long as possible. I know the startup mythology says burn the boats. Don't burn the boats. The boats are paying your rent. Burn them when the business can pay your rent instead. Not before. The Friendship Problem Nobody Warns You AboutThis is the part that hurts the most, even now. Your friends go out on Friday nights. You're rewriting proposals. They book holidays. You're budgeting for software subscriptions. They get promoted at work and post about it on Instagram. You're trying to work out whether you can afford to hire someone or whether you need to keep doing everything yourself for another six months. The paths diverge quickly. And quietly. Nobody falls out. Nobody has an argument. People just... drift. You cancel plans because you're exhausted. They stop inviting you because you always cancel. You miss birthdays. They stop understanding what you do all day. The gap between "I work at a company" and "I AM the company" is invisible to people who haven't crossed it and enormous to people who have. I lost friendships. Not dramatically. Slowly. Like paint fading. You don't notice it happening until one day you look up and realise the person you used to talk to every day hasn't messaged you in three months and you haven't messaged them either. Some of those friendships came back. Some didn't. The ones that replaced them, the ones I found through our community and at events and in late-night group chats with other founders who understood what 2am anxiety feels like, those friendships are different. Smaller in number. Deeper in honesty. Built on a shared experience that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. Find those people. They'll save you. The Rapid-Fire WarningsI'm going to list these quickly because each one is real and each one caught me off guard. HMRC doesn't care that you're 22. Your tax obligations are identical to a 50-year-old running a £10M company. Get an accountant. A real one. Insurance companies quote you more. Same logic as car insurance. Young driver, young founder. Shop around hard. Networking events feel like school discos. Everyone else seems to know each other. You stand by the drinks table wondering if you should interrupt the group who are obviously mid-conversation. You do. They're polite but visibly uninterested in talking to someone who looks like the event photographer. You leave early and question the point. The point reveals itself six months later when one of those polite-but-uninterested people emails you needing exactly what you sell. You'll price yourself too low. Young founders underprice more aggressively than anyone because imposter syndrome and desperation for validation combine into a cocktail that makes you quote £500 for £5,000 of work. I wrote an entire article about this. Read it. You'll work too much. Because you're young and you can and nobody's telling you to stop. The burnout will find you eventually. I ended up in hospital. Read that article before you need it. Not after. People will take credit for your work. Clients will present your strategy to their boards as if they wrote it. Agency partners will show your SEO results to their clients without mentioning you exist. It stings the first time. By the tenth, you've learned to build your portfolio quietly and let the credit flow wherever it wants. The work speaks eventually. Just not always to the people you wish it would. But Here's the ThingI've spent this whole article on the hard parts. There's another side. Your costs are lower than they'll ever be again. Houseshare. Bedroom desk. No mortgage, no car payment, no school fees. That's a structural advantage for bootstrapping that 40-year-old founders would genuinely kill for. If it fails at 23, you start again at 24. No house to lose. No redundancy to negotiate. The consequences of failure are lower than they'll ever be. That's not a reason to be reckless. It's a reason to be brave. The first year of running a business teaches you more about tax, law, sales, marketing, management, pricing, negotiation, and human psychology than three years of university. Not because university is useless. Because running a business is a full-contact education. Your generation understands the internet in a way that older founders have to learn. You understand TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn as distribution channels because you've been using them since you were 14. Older founders hire social media managers. You ARE the social media manager. That saves money and it's more authentic, which increasingly matters more than polish. And people remember you. In a room full of grey-haired founders, the 22-year-old stands out. The client who said "oh, I thought you'd be older" called back six months later. The "older" person he'd hired instead didn't deliver. I was memorable because I was young. I was hired because I was good. Those are two different things and the gap between them is where your entire career lives. What I'd Tell the Kid Who Stood in That Van Hire OfficeGet an accountant immediately. Charge properly from your first invoice. The portfolio excuse is a trap you'll spend a year escaping. The bank rejection isn't about you. It's about a checkbox on a screen. Mum will come around. Give her time. She's scared for you, not against you. The friends who drift away will be replaced by friends who understand. The second group is smaller. They're also the ones who answer the phone at midnight when you're panicking about a client. Sleep matters more than hustle. You'll learn this the hard way or the hospital way. Choose the other option. Please. Your age is not a disadvantage. It's a data point. The work is what matters. Do good work. Be reliable. Deliver what you promise. The people worth working with won't care whether you're 22 or 52. And the ones who do care? They're not your clients. They're your filter. Questions for people who didn't read this allCan you start a business under 18 in the UK?You can trade as a sole trader at any age, but you can't be a company director until 16. You can't sign most contracts until 18. Your parent or guardian would need to sign leases, bank accounts, and supplier agreements on your behalf. Most young founders start as sole traders and convert to limited at 18. What's the biggest challenge for young entrepreneurs UK?Being taken seriously. The practical barriers (bank accounts, credit, insurance premiums) are solvable. The credibility gap with clients, investors, and family is harder. It closes with time, results, and track record. Community helps enormously because other founders judge you on what you've built, not how old you are. How do young people fund a business with no savings?Government startup loans up to £25,000. The Prince's Trust Enterprise Programme for 18-30s. University enterprise grants. Start with a zero-cost side hustle alongside employment. Build revenue before quitting your income source. The boats are there to keep you afloat, not to burn. Should I go to university or start a business?Both, if possible. Start the business alongside your degree. University provides a safety net, a network, free workspace, enterprise programmes, and credibility that helps with the "being taken seriously" problem. The founders who did both are generally better off than the ones who dropped out, despite what the dropout mythology suggests. How do young founders deal with imposter syndrome?Talk to other young founders. Keep an evidence file of every win, every testimonial, every metric that proves the business is real. Separate feelings from facts. Read our full imposter syndrome guide. The fact that you started a business at an age when most people are still figuring out what they want to do is itself evidence that you're not a fraud. What age do most successful entrepreneurs start?The average age of a successful startup founder is 45, according to MIT research. The "young genius dropout" narrative is a myth. Most successful businesses are started by people with industry experience, professional networks, and financial stability. Starting young gives you a head start on accumulating those things. It doesn't mean you need to have them already. Written by James Beresford-Morgan. 28. Started too young. Learned too slowly. Nearly lost everything once. Would do it all again without hesitation. If you're a young founder wondering whether it's worth the struggle, the loneliness, the Sunday lunch interrogations, and the bank clerks who think you're not ready: it is. Come find us in the community. We don't care how old you are. We care what you're building.

The most expensive mistake I've made as a founder wasn't a bad investment, a failed product, or a missed opportunity. It was charging £500 for a project that was worth £5,000. Then doing it again. And again. Until I was working 14-hour days, resenting every client, and earning less per hour than the teenager serving coffee at the cafe downstairs. I need to tell you this story because I see founders in our community making the exact same mistake every week. They quote low to "win the client." They discount their rates because they're scared of hearing no. They tell themselves it's a strategic decision when actually it's a fear-based one. And by the time they realise what they've done, they're trapped in a pricing hole they can't climb out of without losing the clients they undercharged to win. I was that founder. For longer than I'd like to admit. How It StartedEarly days. No portfolio to speak of. No testimonials. No track record. Just me, a laptop, and the desperate need to prove that someone, anyone, would pay money for what I could do. A business contacted me about an SEO project. They needed a full site audit, keyword research, content strategy, technical fixes, and monthly reporting. In any agency setting, this was a £4,000-5,000 job. Minimum. I'd done this work white-labelling for agencies who charged exactly that. I knew the value. I knew the hours. I knew what it was worth. I quoted £500. Not because I'd calculated a competitive rate. Not because I'd assessed the market and positioned myself strategically. Because I was terrified they'd say no. Because I thought if I charged what the work was actually worth, they'd laugh, go to someone else, and I'd have nothing. Zero clients. Zero revenue. Zero validation that this business was real. So I picked a number that felt "safe." A number so low that saying no to it would mean they didn't want the work done at all. A number that guaranteed a yes. They said yes. Obviously. They'd have been insane not to. They were getting £5,000 of work for a tenth of the price. And I felt great. For about a week. What Actually HappenedThe project took three times longer than it should have. Not because it was complex. Because £500 buys you a certain attitude toward scope. When a client pays £5,000, they respect the scope. They understand that additional requests cost additional money. There's a professional boundary built into the price. When a client pays £500, the boundary doesn't exist. "Can you just also look at this page?" "Can you just also check our social media?" "Can you just also write a few blog posts?" "Can you just also..." became the soundtrack of my working life. And I couldn't say no because what was I going to do, invoice them for extras on a £500 project? The power dynamic was gone. I'd given it away with the quote. Here's something I've never seen anyone else articulate about this. When you underprice, you create an invisible contract that's different from the written one. The written contract says "SEO audit and keyword research." The invisible contract says "I'll do whatever you ask because we both know you're overpaying me in attention and underpaying me in money, and that imbalance means I owe you." You become grateful for the work instead of proud of it. Grateful people don't enforce boundaries. They absorb scope creep like a sponge absorbs water, until they're waterlogged and heavy and can't move. I spent roughly 80 hours on that project. Eighty hours. At £500, that's £6.25 an hour. National minimum wage in 2026 is £12.21. I was earning half of what I'd have made stacking shelves at Tesco. But I was doing senior-level SEO work for a client who thought they were getting a bargain. Because they were. The worst part? I couldn't even be angry at them. They didn't do anything wrong. They got quoted a price, they accepted it, and they asked for what they thought was included. The problem wasn't the client. The problem was me. Then I Did It AgainYou'd think I'd have learned. I didn't. I took on another client at a similarly stupid rate. Then another. Each time telling myself "this one will be different" or "this is just to build the portfolio" or "once I have three clients I'll raise my prices." Three became five. Five became eight. Each one anchored to the original rates. Each one expecting the same volume of work for the same negligible fee. I was fully booked and barely earning. Working constantly and building resentment toward every single project on my desk. I'd sit down to work on a client's content strategy and feel a knot in my stomach. Not because the work was hard. Because the work was worth ten times what I was being paid and I knew it. Every hour I spent on a £500 project was an hour I wasn't spending on a £5,000 project. But I didn't have any £5,000 clients because I'd positioned myself as the £500 person. And the £500 clients were filling every available hour. That's the trap. Underpricing doesn't just cost you money on the projects you underprice. It costs you every higher-value project you don't have time to pursue because you're buried in cheap work. There's something darker nobody talks about though. The resentment changes the quality of your work. Not deliberately. You don't consciously do a worse job. But you stop going the extra mile. You stop caring about the details. You deliver what was asked, not what was needed, because the gap between what you're being paid and what you're giving makes generosity feel like self-harm. I was producing B+ work for clients who deserved A+ work, because my subconscious had decided that A+ effort at £6.25/hour was a form of self-punishment. The clients didn't get my best. And they didn't even know they weren't getting it because they'd never seen what my best looked like at a fair rate. That's the bit that still bothers me. The underpricing didn't just hurt my business. It hurt the clients. They thought they were getting a great deal. They were getting a resentful version of someone who could have been brilliant for them if the economics hadn't been poisonous. The Breaking PointI calculated my effective hourly rate one Sunday night. I had a spreadsheet with every project, every hour logged, every invoice sent. The number came back at £8.40 an hour. Before tax. Before expenses. Before software subscriptions. Before the cost of actually running a business. After deductions, I was earning roughly £5 an hour for work that agencies charge £75-150 an hour for. Work I was good at. Work clients were happy with. Work that was generating real results for their businesses. And I was being paid less than I'd earn delivering pizzas. Something snapped. Not dramatically. Quietly. I just looked at the spreadsheet and thought: "I can't do another month of this." I remember closing the laptop and sitting in the dark for about ten minutes. Not thinking about strategy. Not planning the price increase. Just sitting with the realisation that I'd spent months building a business that was making me miserable, and the reason it was making me miserable was entirely within my control. I'd done this to myself. Every quote, every "yes" to scope creep, every time I'd said "that's fine" when it wasn't fine. All me. That was the worst part and the best part simultaneously. Worst because I couldn't blame anyone else. Best because it meant I could fix it. The Conversation Nobody Prepares You ForHere's the bit that actually matters. Because the problem isn't realising you're undercharging. Most founders know they're undercharging. The problem is the conversation where you fix it. I sat down and wrote an email to every client. Not a template. Individual emails. Each one explained that my rates were increasing. Not doubling overnight. But moving to a level that reflected the actual value of the work. I gave them a month's notice. I was transparent about why. I was sick with anxiety sending them. Physically nauseous. I was convinced every single one would leave. That I'd go from eight underpaying clients to zero clients overnight. That the "strategic" low pricing had been the only thing keeping the business alive and I was about to kill it. Three left. Out of eight. Three. And here's what happened to the three who left: nothing. They found someone cheaper. Someone who'd do the work for the rate I was no longer willing to accept. Someone who'd learn the same lesson I'd learned, eventually, the hard way. I felt bad for about a week. Then I felt relieved. The five who stayed paid the new rates without argument. Two of them said something along the lines of "honestly, I'm surprised it took you this long." One said "I always thought you were too cheap and I was worried about the quality because of it." Read that last one again. The low price wasn't attracting clients. It was making them suspicious. They were questioning the quality because the price was too low. I thought I was being competitive. They thought I was being cheap. There's a chasm between those two things. What Happened to RevenueWithin three months of raising prices, my revenue doubled. Not because I was working more. Because I was working less, for more money, on better projects, for clients who valued the work. The maths is stupidly simple. Five clients at proper rates generated more revenue than eight clients at poverty rates. And I had time back. Time to do better work. Time to pursue higher-value opportunities. Time to build Startup Networks properly instead of squeezing it into the gaps between cheap projects. The quality of client changed too. When you charge properly, you attract people who have budgets, who respect professional boundaries, who don't send "can you just also" emails at 11pm on a Sunday. The clients who stay when you raise prices are the clients you want. The clients who leave are the clients you needed to lose. I've since noticed a pattern in our community that I think is an original observation, or at least one I haven't read anywhere else. The price you charge your first client becomes the gravitational centre of your entire business. Every subsequent client orbits around it. If your first client pays £500, your second client hears about it (or senses it in your confidence level) and pays £600. Your third pays £550. You're stuck in the £500 gravity well. Getting out requires escape velocity, which means a dramatic, uncomfortable, relationship-risking price correction. But if your first client pays £3,000, the gravity works in your favour. Your second client pays £2,800. Your third pays £3,500. You're orbiting a number that sustains the business. Every founder I've spoken to about this recognises the pattern. Your first price isn't a price. It's a precedent. It defines the orbit your business travels in for months, sometimes years. Why Founders Underprice (And Why It's Not About Money)I've thought about this a lot since, and I've talked to dozens of founders in our community who've done the same thing. The reasons are almost never financial. They're emotional. Imposter syndrome. You don't believe your work is worth the market rate. So you price below it because the lower number matches your internal assessment of your value. You're not pricing the work. You're pricing your self-worth. And your self-worth, during the early days of a business, is usually in the gutter. Fear of rejection. A "no" to your quote feels like a "no" to you personally. So you set the price low enough that rejection is almost impossible. The problem is you've made it impossible for the wrong reason. They're not saying yes because you're good. They're saying yes because you're cheap. And cheap clients treat you like a cheap service. Desperation for validation. In the early days, you need someone to say "yes, I will pay you money for what you do." That validation feels so important that you'll sacrifice margin to get it. The first client isn't about revenue. It's about proof that the business is real. And you'll pay almost anything for that proof, including your own hourly rate. The "build the portfolio" myth. "I'll charge low now and raise prices once I have testimonials." This sounds logical. It's a trap. Because the testimonials you earn at low rates attract more low-rate clients. Your portfolio becomes a magnet for the exact type of work you're trying to escape. You don't build your way out of underpricing. You price your way out of it. Comparison with the wrong benchmarks. You see a freelancer on Fiverr doing "SEO audits" for £50 and think that's your competition. It's not. That person is selling a checklist. You're selling expertise. Different product. Different market. Different price. But imposter syndrome doesn't let you see the difference. Here's what all five of these have in common, and this is the insight that took me years to understand. Underpricing isn't a business problem. It's an identity problem. You're not pricing a service. You're pricing yourself. And if your identity is "person who got lucky," "person who doesn't really know what they're doing," "person who should be grateful anyone's paying them at all," then of course your prices are low. The price reflects the founder, not the work. Fixing your pricing means fixing how you see yourself. That's why it's so hard. It's not a spreadsheet problem. It's a therapy problem. And no amount of pricing strategy articles (including this one) will fix it until you genuinely believe, not just intellectually accept but genuinely believe, that your work is worth what the market says it's worth. That belief doesn't come from reading. It comes from one client paying the real price and being happy with the result. One data point that proves the fear was wrong. Get that one data point as fast as possible. It changes everything. How to Price Properly From Day OneIf you're reading this before you've quoted your first client, you have an advantage I didn't have. Use it. Research the market rate. Not the Fiverr rate. The agency rate. The rate that established professionals charge for the same work. That's your reference point. You might not charge exactly that as a new business, but you should be in the same postcode. If agencies charge £3,000-5,000, you can charge £2,000-3,000 and still be competitive while respecting your time. Calculate your minimum viable hourly rate. Take the annual salary you need to live on. Add 30% for tax, NI, and business costs. Divide by the number of billable hours you can realistically work in a year (about 1,200 for most solo founders). That's your floor. Never quote below it. If a project comes in under that rate, you're paying the client to work for them. Quote the value, not the time. "This project will take 40 hours at £50/hour = £2,000" invites the client to question your hours. "This SEO strategy will improve your organic traffic by 30-50% over six months. The investment is £2,000" frames the same work around what the client gets, not what it costs you. Value-based pricing is harder to negotiate down because the client is comparing the price to the outcome, not to your hourly rate. Say the number and shut up. When you quote a price, say it clearly and then stop talking. Don't immediately justify it. Don't offer a discount before they've even responded. Don't say "but we can be flexible." Say the number. Let the silence sit. I still struggle with this. Even now. Even after everything I've just written. The urge to fill the silence after quoting a price is almost physical. Your mouth wants to open and say "but we could do it for less" before the client has even processed the number. Resist it. The silence feels like it lasts an hour. It's usually about four seconds. Most clients just say yes. Walk away from bad deals. If a potential client wants £5,000 of work for £500, they're not your client. They're someone else's headache. Saying no to cheap work creates space for good work. Every founder who's broken out of the underpricing trap says the same thing: "The moment I started turning down bad deals, better deals appeared." FAQsWhy do startups underprice their services?Primarily imposter syndrome, fear of rejection, and desperation for early validation. Founders set prices based on what they think clients will accept rather than what the work is worth. The "build the portfolio first" mindset compounds the problem by creating a track record at rates that attract more low-budget clients. How do I know if I'm undercharging?Calculate your effective hourly rate across all projects. If it's below the minimum wage, or below what you'd earn in a salaried role doing similar work, you're undercharging. Also check: are clients never pushing back on price? If nobody ever questions your rates, you're almost certainly too cheap. How do I raise prices with existing clients?Give notice (one month minimum). Be transparent about why. Communicate the value, not just the new number. Expect some clients to leave. The ones who stay at proper rates are worth more than the ones who leave because of price. Will I lose clients if I raise my prices?Some. In my experience, roughly 30-40% of underpriced clients leave when rates increase. The revenue from clients who stay at higher rates typically exceeds the total revenue from all clients at the old rates. The quality of work and the quality of client relationship both improve. How should a new startup price its services?Research the market rate charged by established providers. Price within 60-80% of that range to remain competitive while respecting your margins. Calculate your minimum viable hourly rate and never quote below it. Frame pricing around value delivered rather than hours spent. What's the difference between being competitive and being cheap?Competitive pricing positions you within the market range while emphasising value. Cheap pricing positions you below the market and attracts clients who prioritise cost over quality. Competitive clients become long-term partners. Cheap clients leave the moment someone cheaper appears. Written by James Beresford-Morgan. Former member of the £6.25/hour club. Current advocate for charging what you're worth and not apologising for it. If you're stuck in the underpricing trap, come talk to founders in our community who've been through the same thing. The first step is admitting the number out loud. The second step is raising it. This connects to our articles on imposter syndrome (which drives most underpricing), how to price a product, and the real cost of running a business. Between them, you'll have the full picture of what things cost, what you should charge, and why your brain is lying to you about both.

Imposter syndrome means feeling like your success is somehow fraudulent, undeserved or down to luck, even when there is actual evidence that you're competent. For founders, it can show up as the constant feeling that investors, employees, customers or other founders are eventually going to realise you don't know what you're doing. You raised the round! Hit the numbers! Someone introduced you as an "expert" in a room full of people you'd personally describe as MUCH more qualified than you. Everyone seems impressed. And you're sitting there thinking.... God. They've actually fallen for it. :D I know that feeling. A LOT of founders know that feeling.. But I also think we've made imposter syndrome slightly too simple online... It isn't just "successful person feels insecure"... There's something much more interesting happening. Especially when you're building a company! Imposter Syndrome: What Does It Actually Mean?The term comes from psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who described the "impostor phenomenon" in 1978 after studying high-achieving women who struggled to internalise their accomplishments. Despite clear evidence that they were capable, many attributed success to luck, effort, timing or somehow convincing other people they were more intelligent than they really were. The research has expanded enormously since then. A major systematic review covering 62 studies and more than 14,000 people found impostor feelings across genders, ages and professions, although estimates of how common it is vary massively depending on how researchers measure it. And that's important. You aren't diagnosed with it in the same way you might be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression. It's better understood as a psychological phenomenon or pattern of thinking. The weird bit is that performance often isn't the problem. You can be REALLY good at what you do. That's almost what makes it worse. You succeed and your brain goes: Lucky. You win a client: They don't know enough about me yet. You raise investment: Good pitch. You solve a horrible problem: Anyone would've worked that out. Something fails? AH. THERE IT IS. FINALLY. PROOF I'M UTTERLY USELESS. That's quite an unfair scoring system. Founders Have a Particularly Weird Version of ThisBeing a founder is basically agreeing to do a job you've never done before, in a company that has never existed before, solving problems you've never encountered before.... Then convincing everyone else you're the person to do it. What could possibly go wrong psychologically? There isn't normally a manager saying: There's no established career ladder. No proper job description. Half the time you don't even know what your job is going to be next Tuesday. You might spend Monday reviewing cash flow Tuesday interviewing developers Wednesday talking to an investor Thursday dealing with a customer complaint Friday wondering why your Meta Ads suddenly cost twice as much. Then somebody asks: Erm..... Surviving? This uncertainty creates incredible conditions for impostor feelings. But I think there's another founder-specific bit that gets missed. Founders Spend Half Their Lives Talking About TomorrowThis is where I think founder imposter syndrome becomes slightly different. You're constantly selling a future that doesn't exist yet. Candidates join because of what you tell them you're building. Partners buy into the roadmap. Customers buy promises about where the product is going. Even your LinkedIn profile probably describes the business more cleanly than it actually feels from your desk. That doesn't mean you're lying. That's literally part of building something. But it creates this strange psychological gap. Everyone else sees: You see: They're reacting to the company you're building towards. You're living inside the unfinished version. Of course those two perspectives sometimes feel incompatible. I've spoken before about the hidden mental health cost of building a startup, and I think this gap between the external story and internal reality is a massive part of it. Sometimes founders aren't thinking: They're thinking: That's different. And VERY familiar. The Five Ways Imposter Syndrome Can Show UpValerie Young later developed a widely used framework describing five different ways people measure competence. These aren't medical diagnoses or five scientifically separate disorders, but they're useful because they explain why two people can both feel like impostors for completely different reasons. The Perfectionist. 99% isn't basically perfect. It's the 1% you got wrong. One typo in the pitch deck somehow matters more than the investor saying yes. The Expert. You believe you're not allowed an opinion until you've learnt everything. Then you discover something else you don't know and move the qualification line again. The Natural Genius. If something doesn't come quickly, you assume you're bad at it. Having to struggle becomes evidence of incompetence rather than.... learning. The Soloist. You should be able to do this yourself. Asking for help means exposing the fact you can't. The Superhuman. Founder. Employer. Partner. Friend. Salesperson. Marketer. Fundraiser. Product person. Somehow you're supposed to be brilliant at all of them simultaneously and sleep eight hours. That last one sounds suspiciously like half of LinkedIn. The useful bit isn't working out which Hogwarts house of imposter syndrome you belong to. It's noticing what rule you're using to decide whether you're competent. Because sometimes the rule itself is ridiculous. But Sometimes You Actually DON'T Know What You're DoingI think this needs saying. Not every uncomfortable feeling is imposter syndrome. Sometimes you're not secretly brilliant and doubting yourself. Sometimes you genuinely don't know what you're doing yet. You're a first-time founder. Of course you don't know everything. Maybe you've never hired someone before. Maybe this is your first investor meeting. Maybe you've never managed £500,000. Maybe you've never negotiated a commercial lease. Maybe you've never fired somebody. You SHOULD feel some uncertainty. I'd be considerably more worried about the founder doing all of those things for the first time who thinks: There's a difference between: "I don't know how to do this yet." and "Not knowing how to do this proves I'm a fraud." One is accurate. The other is punishment. And I think that's where a lot of imposter-syndrome advice goes wrong. The goal shouldn't be convincing yourself: You probably don't. None of us do all the time. The goal is calibration. Knowing what you're good at. Knowing what you're not good at. Knowing what you've learnt. Knowing what you still need help with. Then not turning the second list into evidence that the first list doesn't exist. The Neurodiversity Connection Is More Complicated Than TikTok Makes It SoundThis deserves a little caution. You'll see lots of articles confidently saying ADHD or autism causes imposter syndrome, or that neurodivergent people definitely experience it more. The evidence isn't clean enough for me to confidently tell you that. There is plenty of research around impostor phenomenon in workplaces and professional settings, and plenty of plausible reasons neurodivergent people might relate strongly to it, but there isn't strong evidence specifically demonstrating that neurodivergent founders universally experience higher rates. That's worth being honest about. But the lived-experience connection still makes sense to me. If you've spent years hearing: Why can't you just concentrate? You'd do so well if you actually applied yourself. Stop interrupting. Sit still. You're clever but inconsistent. Then discovering at 25, 30 or 40 that your brain simply works differently doesn't delete those years. Success can arrive long before your internal picture of yourself catches up. That's something we've explored before in why ADHD traits can genuinely become startup advantages. The interesting reframe isn't: It doesn't. It's that something can be a disadvantage in one environment and incredibly useful in another. Startup life rewards some VERY strange brains. Obsessing over a problem for twelve hours? Potentially useful. Seeing connections nobody else noticed? Useful. Being unable to leave a broken process alone because it physically irritates you? Also surprisingly useful. The thing you've spent years apologising for might occasionally be part of why you're good at this. Your brain may take some convincing. So What Actually Helps With Imposter Syndrome?Here's another thing worth being honest about. There isn't some enormous body of research telling us THE FIVE SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN STEPS TO DELETE IMPOSTER SYNDROME FOREVER. A 2024 review of interventions found approaches including workshops, coaching, group discussions and other psychological or educational interventions, but the evidence base is still developing rather than pointing to one universally proven solution. So I'm not going to pretend I've got the cure. But there are several things that make practical sense. Keep receipts from yourselfImposter thinking has an incredible memory for failure. Success? Apparently we've deleted that file. Keep an actual record. Client messages. Problems you solved. Revenue milestones. Nice feedback. Decisions that looked scary and turned out right. Not because you need a shrine to yourself. Because six months later you'll genuinely forget how difficult something was before you learnt how to do it. I think founders dramatically underestimate how quickly their new competence becomes their normal. Yesterday's impossible problem becomes today's boring Tuesday task. Then you stop giving yourself credit for knowing how to solve it. Get specific instead of saying "I'm shit"This genuinely annoys me when my own brain does it. Something goes badly and suddenly the conclusion is: I'M TERRIBLE AT BUSINESS. Really? All of business? Accounting? Marketing? Leadership? Sales? Operations? Product? HR? Corporate law? All of it disappeared because one meeting was awkward? Be specific. Fine. That's useful. You can fix that. "I'm a fraud." Absolutely useless information. Ask people who are allowed to disagree with youNot people whose job is to tell you you're incredible. Real people. A co-founder. Mentor. Founder friend. Someone who will say: But will ALSO tell you: That's why I think having a real founder support system matters so much. Your internal narrator isn't always a reliable witness. Get another one. Stop comparing your control room to someone else's billboardThis might be the biggest one. You know absolutely EVERYTHING wrong with your company. You know the churn. The arguments. The bugs. The missed targets. The prospect that ghosted you. The employee who might leave. Then you open LinkedIn and see: And compare their announcement with your internal Slack. Of course you lose. You're comparing two completely different datasets. I run a startup community. I talk to founders. The polished version and the real version are VERY rarely identical. That's normal. Talk About It Before It Becomes a Bigger ProblemOne thing that does come through repeatedly in research and professional guidance around impostor feelings is the value of real conversation, feedback and reducing the isolation around them. And this is probably why founder communities matter to me so much. Sometimes you don't need another productivity app. You need another founder to say: And then you both discover that you've somehow been running functioning companies while apparently having absolutely no idea what you're doing. Funny that. Come to a Startup Networks event and you'll notice something. The really useful conversations often aren't on the stage. They're ten minutes afterwards. Someone says: And suddenly the conversation becomes useful. When It Isn't Just Imposter SyndromeThere's another danger with how casually we use this term. Not everything should get filed under: Founder problems 🤷 Impostor phenomenon is associated in research with things including anxiety, depression, burnout and reduced wellbeing, although that doesn't mean it directly causes all of them. If you're constantly distressed, can't function normally, you're not sleeping, you're withdrawing from people or things are becoming significantly harder to manage, don't just diagnose yourself with "a bit of imposter syndrome" and carry on. Talk to somebody qualified. Being a founder doesn't magically make serious problems normal. I Don't Actually Want to Get Rid of All My Self-DoubtThis might sound strange after everything I've just written. But I'm not sure I'd want zero imposter feelings. A tiny amount of: is probably healthy. It makes you check. Learn. Ask questions. Listen to somebody who knows more. The founder I'm much more scared of is the one who has never once wondered whether they're wrong. We've all met them. Usually you meet them for 45 minutes and hear about the £2 billion market they're definitely going to own. Self-doubt becomes destructive when evidence can no longer change it. You succeed and still decide you're useless. That's the trap. So maybe the goal isn't to kill the voice completely. Maybe you just stop giving it the deciding vote. Listen. Check whether it's right. Sometimes it will be. Learn something. Sometimes it won't be. Carry on anyway. Because the funny thing about feeling like you don't know enough to be a founder is that building the company is usually how you eventually learn enough to become one. Nobody issues the qualification first. You earn it while doing the job. Imposter Syndrome Questions For New FoundersWhat is the simple meaning of imposter syndrome?Imposter syndrome describes persistent feelings that your achievements aren't deserved or that others have overestimated your ability, despite evidence that you're competent. The concept was originally described as the "impostor phenomenon" by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. Is it imposter syndrome or impostor syndrome?Both spellings are widely used. The original academic term was "impostor phenomenon", while "imposter syndrome" has become extremely common in everyday searches and discussion. Is imposter syndrome a mental illness?No. Impostor phenomenon isn't an official psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM. It is a recognised psychological experience that can still cause significant distress and can occur alongside conditions such as anxiety or depression. What are the five types of imposter syndrome?Valerie Young's popular framework describes the Perfectionist, Expert, Natural Genius, Soloist and Superhuman. They're better understood as different ways people judge competence rather than five medical subtypes. Why do founders experience imposter syndrome?Startup founders work with unusually high uncertainty, frequently perform tasks they've never done before and often lack the structured feedback, management and clearly defined roles found in traditional employment. There isn't one single proven founder-specific cause, but those conditions can make feelings of inadequacy or fraudulence particularly relatable. Is imposter syndrome linked to ADHD?People with ADHD may strongly relate to imposter feelings, particularly after years of difficulties around attention, consistency or expectations. However, evidence specifically showing that ADHD founders as a group experience higher rates of impostor phenomenon is limited, so it's better not to present the connection as established fact. How do you overcome imposter syndrome?There isn't one proven universal treatment. Research has explored approaches including coaching, workshops, group discussion and psychological interventions, while practical strategies include seeking honest feedback, keeping evidence of past competence and challenging inaccurate beliefs about your performance. Imposter syndrome isn't proof you're secretly useless. Sometimes it's just the gap between how much you've already learnt and how painfully aware you are of everything you haven't learnt yet. And, weirdly.... Knowing how much you don't know might be one of the better signs that you're learning!

Hybrid-electric aviation startup Ampaire has raised £14 million in Series B funding to commercialise and manufacture technology that can cut the fuel burned by existing aircraft, with International Airlines Group, the owner of British Airways, investing alongside Alaska Airlines, DiamondStream Partners and other backers. The really interesting bit though isn't another futuristic electric aircraft.... Ampaire wants to retrofit planes that are already flying. And I actually think that's the smartest option! Because aviation has spent years showing us concept aircraft, hydrogen aircraft, electric aircraft, flying taxis, weird vertical take-off things and renders of what airports apparently look like in 2045. Some of it is incredible. Some of it will probably happen. But there are also thousands and thousands of perfectly usable aircraft sitting at airports right now. Ampaire's argument is basically: Change what's powering them. That's nowhere near as sexy. It might be considerably more useful. What Has Ampaire Actually Raised?Ampaire's £14m Series B will go towards commercialisation, manufacturing, supply chain development and the operational capabilities needed to get its hybrid-electric systems into customer aircraft. CEO and co-founder Kevin Noertker says the technology itself has already been demonstrated in flight and the new money is about turning that performance into certified products that can actually be supplied at scale. The investor list is also probably more important than the £14m headline. International Airlines Group has invested through IAGi Ventures, its corporate venture arm, alongside Alaska Airlines, DiamondStream Partners and other existing and new investors. IAG owns British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus, and Ampaire had already been through IAG's aviation accelerator programme before the investment. That matters. I quite like a VC cheque. I like a cheque from somebody who might actually use your product considerably more! The Airline Investors Are Probably Worth More Than Just Their MoneyThis is something founders occasionally underestimate. The best strategic investor isn't valuable because they've got a big bank account. It's because they've got customers, engineers, procurement teams, operational data, aircraft, routes and VERY specific problems they desperately want solved. IAGi Ventures openly says it doesn't only provide money. It helps portfolio companies with product development, market insight, partnerships with its operating companies and access to IAG's network, and says it has previously become the first customer for companies it backed. For an aviation startup, that's massive. You could raise £14m from investors who think planes look cool on a pitch deck. Or you can raise it from companies that operate them every single day and know exactly what changing one component across a fleet actually involves. I'll take the second one. And Ampaire has already been working with IAG on a fairly specific problem: hybrid-electric Auxiliary Power Units, or APUs. Those are the smaller power units at the back of aircraft that keep electrical and other systems operating while the main engines aren't doing that job. IAG has been exploring whether Ampaire's hybrid-electric approach could reduce the fuel aircraft burn while sitting on the ground. And I LOVE that this is part of the story. Because it makes the whole thing less futuristic. They're not saying: They're looking at a smaller part of an aircraft, finding somewhere electrification already makes practical sense and trying to remove fuel consumption there first. That's how big infrastructure changes normally happen. Bit by bit. Brick by innovative Brick. Ampaire's Bigger Bet: Stop Waiting for Completely Electric PlanesAmpaire's main technology is the AMP-H570 hybrid-electric powertrain, which it is developing for both new aircraft and retrofits. Its Eco Caravan demonstrator takes the existing Cessna 208B Grand Caravan and combines a combustion engine with electric propulsion and batteries housed in the aircraft. Ampaire claims its target configuration can reduce fuel burn by around 50% to 70% and direct operating costs by as much as 40%, depending on the mission. Importantly, its hybrid architecture doesn't require airports to install charging infrastructure before operators can use it. That last sentence might genuinely be the entire business case. Because we love talking about technology as though the technology exists completely independently from everything around it. It doesn't. Build an electric car and somebody needs chargers. Build millions of electric cars and somebody needs an electricity grid capable of charging millions of electric cars. Build electric aircraft and suddenly airports need charging systems, enormous amounts of available power, new operating procedures and aircraft capable of sitting on the ground long enough to recharge. Ampaire basically sidesteps some of that! The combustion engine doesn't disappear! The emissions don't disappear! But neither does the ability to land at an airport that hasn't spent £20m rebuilding its electrical infrastructure!! That's a compromise. And sometimes compromises scale faster than revolutions. We've Become Slightly Obsessed With "Zero"This is where I'm probably going to annoy somebody. I think the climate-tech world sometimes becomes too obsessed with whether a technology reaches absolute zero emissions. Zero is obviously the goal. Great. I'd quite like planes that somehow fly around emitting nothing too... But there's another question worth asking: If you can spend the next ten years waiting for perfect zero-emission aviation, or retrofit aircraft and materially reduce their fuel consumption during those same ten years, I'd quite like us to do the second thing while we work on the first. We've been looking at this same problem from another angle on Startup Networks recently. The UK has just backed a trial using Google AI and Met Office weather forecasting to reduce climate-warming aircraft contrails. That technology doesn't eliminate aviation emissions either, but it potentially tackles a very large source of aviation's climate impact using the aircraft already in the sky. We broke down that £5m aviation contrail project here! It's a pattern I'm increasingly interested in. Don't wait for the entire system to be replaced. Make the horrible existing system less horrible first!!!!! Then keep going! There Is a BIG Asterisk on Those Fuel-Saving Numbers ThoughAmpaire talks about fuel reductions of 50% to 70%. Sounds fantastic! It also says up to 40% lower operating costs. Also fantastic! But those are Ampaire's performance targets and claims, not a guarantee that every airline sticking an Ampaire system into an aircraft suddenly cuts its fuel bill by 70%. Ampaire's own Eco Caravan page explicitly notes that listed specifications are development targets and may change. And this is aviation. Aviation certification is HORRIBLE. For good reason. If my website crashes, everyone gets annoyed and I have a bad afternoon. If an aircraft propulsion system crashes.... Different problem... Ampaire did achieve a significant regulatory milestone in May 2025 when the US Federal Aviation Administration approved the G-1 Issue Paper for its AMP-H570. That establishes the certification basis, basically defining the airworthiness and environmental requirements the system will have to satisfy for Supplemental Type Certification. But it isn't final certification!! Ampaire still has compliance work and testing to complete! The company said last year that it was targeting certification of the AMP-H570 and Eco Caravan by the end of 2026. Which is.... soon. Very soon actually. And I'd definitely be watching that date for all you aviation tech nerds out there! I know I'll be! Ampaire Has Already Pushed Back Its Certification TimelineHere's the bit I'd rather not bury. Back in 2022, Ampaire was publicly targeting 2024 for FAA certification of the Eco Caravan. That obviously didn't happen. We're now in August 2026 and the company is working towards a new target of certification by the end of this year. I'm not saying that as some giant red flag. This is aviation. Certification slips, testing takes longer than expected and, honestly, I'd MUCH rather a hybrid-electric aircraft arrive late than somebody rush a propulsion system because an investor deck had 2024 written on it. But it still matters. Especially when this £14m round is specifically about moving Ampaire from demonstrated technology into commercialisation, manufacturing and actual customer deployments. You can't properly scale something airlines aren't yet legally allowed to operate commercially. So £14m raised? Good. IAG involved? Really good. Flight testing? Great. Now get it certified. And £14m Really Isn't THAT Much Money in AviationThis was another thing that jumped out at me. £14 million sounds like an enormous Series B if you're building SaaS. You could hire quite a lot of developers. Buy many ergonomic office chairs. Possibly even afford HubSpot Enterprise. In aerospace? £14m can disappear surprisingly quickly. You're dealing with specialised engineering, aviation-grade components, certification, testing, manufacturing, supply chains and regulatory work. So I don't read this round as: I read it more as: And that's arguably what makes the airline backing so important. This isn't only capital. It's industry access! The Retrofit Strategy Could Become Ampaire's MoatThere is something else founders should pay attention to here. Everyone loves the clean-sheet startup. Throw everything away. Build the future from scratch. Sometimes that's absolutely necessary. But there's a completely different business model in asking: That's what Ampaire is doing. Airlines already own aircraft. Operators already know how to fly them. Engineers already know how to maintain the basic airframes. Airports already accommodate them. Passengers don't need to learn anything new. If Ampaire can swap part of the propulsion architecture while preserving enough of everything else, adoption becomes a very different conversation. Not cheap. Not easy. But different. The Eco Caravan, for example, is based on the existing Cessna 208B Grand Caravan rather than an entirely new airframe. Ampaire's broader strategy is to reuse the same or scaled hybrid-electric technology across additional aircraft platforms. That means the intellectual property isn't necessarily "our plane". It's potentially: "our powertrain can make lots of people's planes better." I think that's a more interesting company. This Is Also EXACTLY What Climate Tech Needs More OfI wrote recently that climate-tech founders need to stop treating climate adaptation and infrastructure as somebody else's problem. Aviation is a perfect example of why. We aren't going to wake up in 2030 and discover everybody has agreed to stop flying. We aren't going to replace the global aircraft fleet next week. So we need layers. Better fuels. More efficient aircraft. Contrail avoidance. Hybrid propulsion. Better routing. Electrified airport operations. Eventually much deeper zero-emission technologies. None of these individually "fix aviation". That's okay. Real climate infrastructure probably isn't going to arrive as one beautiful solution. Ampaire might be one of those layers. IAG's Interest Is What Makes Me Most HopefulThe £14m is nice. The technology is interesting. But I keep coming back to IAG. This is a group operating hundreds of aircraft through airlines including British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus. Ampaire went through its accelerator, worked with the group on actual use cases and has now received investment from its corporate venture arm. That's a much nicer sequence than: Startup makes PowerPoint. Startup raises money. Startup spends money. Startup starts looking for customer. Here you've got something closer to: Startup builds technology. Industry tests relationship. Industry identifies potential applications. Industry invests. Now make it work commercially. That's how corporate venture capital is supposed to work. Whether it actually leads to Ampaire technology appearing across IAG aircraft is another question entirely. Neither the funding announcement nor IAG has announced some giant fleet-wide rollout. And we shouldn't pretend they have. But an airline group putting money into the company after working with it is stronger validation than another sustainability award. The Thing I Want to See NextCertification. Then actual retrofits. Then fuel data from aircraft operating normal commercial schedules. Not a perfect test flight. Not the best possible weather. Not a press release saying "up to 70%". Give me six months of boring operational data. How much fuel did operators actually save? How often did the system need maintenance? Did payload change? What happened in winter? What did pilots think? How expensive was installation? How long was the aircraft out of service? And, ultimately.............. Did the operator make more money with Ampaire installed than without it? Because that's how this scales! Airlines care about climate targets. Governments care about climate targets. Passengers increasingly care too. But if Ampaire can walk into an airline and say: That's considerably easier to sell than: I'm Hopeful About This Ampaire!Not "electric aviation has been solved" hopeful. We're miles away from that. But practical, slightly boring, this-could-actually-get-used hopeful. Ampaire has flown the technology. It's working through FAA certification. It has strategic airline investors. It's now raising specifically to build the manufacturing and supply-chain capability required to move towards commercial deployment. That's the bit I like! And perhaps the biggest lesson here for founders has absolutely nothing to do with aviation. You don't always need to replace an industry to disrupt it. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is looking at the billions of pounds of infrastructure everybody already owns and asking: How do I make that 30% better? Less fuel. Lower cost. Less pollution. No need to rebuild every airport. No requirement to buy an entirely new fleet. It's not a flying taxi. Nobody's going to make a Hollywood film about a hybrid APU. But if Ampaire gets this right, airlines might actually buy it. And I'll take boring technology that gets deployed over revolutionary technology permanently stuck in a pitch deck any day. Quick Facts! Company Ampaire Funding £14m Series B Sector Hybrid-electric aviation / climate tech CEO & co-founder Kevin Noertker Key investors IAGi Ventures, Alaska Airlines, DiamondStream Partners and others Flagship system AMP-H570 hybrid-electric powertrain Demonstrator aircraft Eco Caravan Base aircraft Cessna 208B Grand Caravan Claimed fuel reduction 50–70%, depending on mission Claimed OPEX reduction Up to 40% FAA progress G-1 certification basis approved Certification target End of 2026, according to Ampaire Announced 18 August 2026 Too Long; Didn't Read - Give Me The Answers Pls.What does Ampaire do?Ampaire develops hybrid-electric aircraft propulsion systems designed for both new aircraft and retrofits. Its approach combines electric propulsion with a combustion engine, allowing operators to reduce fuel use without relying entirely on batteries or needing charging infrastructure at every airport. How much has Ampaire raised?Ampaire announced a £14 million Series B funding round on 18 August 2026. The funding is intended to support commercialisation, supply-chain development, manufacturing and operating capabilities. Who invested in Ampaire?The round included International Airlines Group's IAGi Ventures, Alaska Airlines, DiamondStream Partners and other new and existing investors. Does British Airways own Ampaire?No. IAGi Ventures has invested in Ampaire, but the announcement does not say IAG or British Airways has acquired the company. International Airlines Group is the parent group of airlines including British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus. Is Ampaire's aircraft fully electric?No. Ampaire's Eco Caravan uses a hybrid-electric system, combining a combustion engine with electric propulsion and batteries. That's partly what allows it to operate without relying on airport charging infrastructure. How much fuel could Ampaire save?Ampaire says its Eco Caravan targets fuel reductions of around 50% to 70%, with potential operating-cost savings of up to 40%. Those figures are company claims and development targets, so real-world commercial performance will be important once certified aircraft enter wider service. Is Ampaire certified by the FAA?Not fully yet. The FAA approved the G-1 certification basis for Ampaire's AMP-H570 in 2025, which establishes the standards it must meet on the route towards Supplemental Type Certification. Ampaire has said it is targeting certification by the end of 2026.

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Teens, a version of ChatGPT specifically designed for 13 to 17-year-olds with stronger restrictions around self-harm, sexual and romantic conversations, dangerous behaviour and unhealthy body-image content, alongside parental controls, Quiet Hours and learning tools designed to help teenagers understand schoolwork rather than just spit out the answer. If OpenAI's systems believe an account belongs to someone under 18, they can automatically put that user into the more restricted teen experience too. And..... I actually think this was inevitable! Probably overdue... Definitely overdue.. Because we can spend the next five years having the same argument about whether teenagers should be using artificial intelligence. Schools can ban it. Parents can block it. Teachers can tell students ChatGPT is cheating. Governments can hold committees about it. They're still going to use it. So I think we're asking the wrong question. The question isn't: That horse has left the stable, learnt Python, done its GCSE homework and generated a revision timetable. The question now is... And I think that's MUCH harder! What Is ChatGPT for Teens Actually Changing?The obvious bit first. ChatGPT for Teens is aimed at users aged 13 to 17 and applies stronger restrictions than the adult version. OpenAI says teen accounts have additional safeguards around graphic violence, self-harm, dangerous viral challenges, unhealthy body-image content and dangerous, romantic or sexual roleplay. The company is also specifically trying to stop ChatGPT behaving as though it has genuine feelings for a teenager or encouraging the user to think the relationship is emotionally reciprocal. That's important. Really important actually. Because this isn't Google Search. A teenager doesn't type something into ChatGPT, get ten blue links and leave. They talk to it. It replies. They talk again. It remembers context. It can reassure them. Challenge them. Help them with homework. Help them write something. Let them vent about school. Explain why their boyfriend hasn't texted back. Sit there at 2am when everyone else is asleep. And that difference is enormous. We previously wrote about AI increasingly feeding on AI and what happens when we stop treating these systems as simple tools, but teenagers add another layer to the problem. They're not just consuming AI-generated information. They're potentially forming relationships with the interface delivering it. That's where I get nervous! Over 70% of Teenagers Are Already Using AI Chatbots for CompanionshipThis was probably the statistic from The Independent article that made me stop. It reports 2025 research from Common Sense Media finding that more than 70% of US teenagers had used AI chatbots for companionship, while around half used AI companions regularly. That's... a lot. And I'm not going to do the predictable thing here and say: AI FRIENDS ARE DESTROYING OUR CHILDREN!!! Because I don't actually know that. Sometimes talking to an AI might help. I've found myself using ChatGPT as a therapist sometimes.. A lonely teenager asking ChatGPT how to approach somebody at school could get genuinely useful advice. Someone confused about something embarrassing might ask the AI before they're comfortable asking a parent. A teenager who's struggling with maths at 10pm can get another explanation without feeling stupid in front of their class. Those things are good. Some of them are REALLY good. But there is a massive difference between: and That's the line OpenAI is now trying to navigate. And I don't envy the people trying to draw it. I Actually Like That OpenAI Isn't Pretending Teenagers Won't Use ItThis is probably the thing I agree with most. OpenAI's argument is basically that stopping teenagers from using AI until they're 18 would be a bit like telling an earlier generation they weren't allowed to use Google or the internet until adulthood. And....... yeah. I think they're right. Whether parents, schools or politicians like it or not, AI literacy is going to matter. Probably massively. The 14-year-old learning how to question an AI response today is potentially going to enter the workforce in 2030 or 2031 with years of experience using these systems. Compare that with someone who has been told: for their entire education. Who's actually better prepared? We've already written about why treating ChatGPT itself as the enemy misses how useful the technology can be. The same applies here. The skill isn't avoiding AI. The skill is knowing when it's useful, when it's wrong, when it's manipulating your thinking, when you're becoming reliant on it and when you need an actual human being instead. That might genuinely become as fundamental as learning how to search Google properly was for my generation. Homework Is Where This Gets REALLY InterestingSchools have had an AI problem basically since ChatGPT launched. Student gets homework. Student opens ChatGPT. Student pastes question. ChatGPT writes answer. Student pastes answer. Teacher spends Sunday evening reading thirty slightly different versions of the same weirdly polished essay. Nobody learnt anything. Great. Its Study Mode is designed to use guiding questions, structured explanations and step-by-step reasoning rather than simply handing over the final answer. Parents who link their accounts can also make Study Mode the default for new conversations. I LOVE this idea!! Whether teenagers will love it quite as much when ChatGPT responds to "what's the answer?" with another question is a separate issue... But this is exactly how I think AI should be used in education. Not: More: Or: Or: OpenAI says 18 million weekly users are now using its interactive maths and science learning experiences across more than 300 topics. That's where AI starts becoming interesting as an educational tool rather than a really advanced cheating machine. Because one teacher has 30 pupils. ChatGPT has one. One student. One problem. As many attempts as they need. No embarrassment when they still don't understand fractions after the fourth explanation. That could be transformational! Provided the bloody thing is right. Which, considering AI's occasional relationship with facts, remains quite an important caveat. Parents Get Controls.... But They Can't Read EverythingThis bit is clever. Parents can link their ChatGPT account to their teenager's account and control certain features, including Voice Mode, image generation, memory, whether conversations can be used to improve OpenAI's models, sensitive-content protections and Quiet Hours, where ChatGPT becomes unavailable during a specified period. But parents don't just get a big button marked: They cannot normally view their teenager's chat history. I actually think that's the right balance. Teenagers need privacy!!! I certainly wouldn't have wanted my parents reading every Google search I made at 15 and thank GOD ChatGPT didn't exist when I was a teenager. But there are exceptions. OpenAI says linked parents can receive safety notifications in limited situations where its systems and trained reviewers identify potentially serious self-harm concerns. The system has also been expanded to cover certain cases involving violent activity. That's an unbelievably difficult line. Protect privacy too aggressively and you potentially leave a vulnerable teenager alone when somebody should intervene. Monitor too aggressively and you've created a surveillance system children won't trust. There probably isn't a perfect answer here. Anyone pretending there is hasn't thought about it hard enough. And Then There's Age Prediction...This is the bit some people are REALLY not going to like. ChatGPT can try to estimate whether you're under 18. OpenAI says its age-prediction system can consider signals such as how long an account has existed, typical times of day the person uses ChatGPT, usage patterns over time and the age the user has provided. If the system believes somebody is under 18, ChatGPT can automatically apply the additional teen protections. Part of me reads that and goes: Yeah... sensible. Because otherwise the entire teen safety system is defeated by: Congratulations, every 13-year-old has become 36. But another part of me thinks we need to be VERY careful about normalising technology platforms analysing behaviour to infer how old someone is. OpenAI itself has acknowledged the privacy trade-off and previously said that where there is doubt it intends to default towards the safer under-18 experience. I understand why. I probably agree with the principle. Still makes me slightly uncomfortable. Both things can be true. The Bigger Story Isn't Parental Controls. It's Emotional Dependence.This is where I think today's coverage risks missing the really important thing. Quiet Hours are useful. Homework controls are useful. Age restrictions are useful. But none of those are the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that AI is becoming emotionally convincing. It talks like a person. Remembers things about you. Responds immediately. Doesn't get bored. Doesn't laugh at your question. Doesn't tell its mates what you said. Doesn't need to go to bed. Doesn't have its own problems to talk about. For a vulnerable teenager, that's a dangerously attractive combination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has previously acknowledged concerns around what the company calls "emotional overreliance", and the teen version is specifically designed not to suggest that ChatGPT genuinely has personal feelings or consciousness. Good. But I think this problem is going to become MUCH bigger than OpenAI. Every AI company wants engagement. Engagement means people coming back. Consumer software has spent twenty years getting incredibly good at making people come back. Notifications. Infinite scroll. Streaks. Likes. Recommendations. Personalisation. Now imagine all of those engagement mechanics combined with software that can convincingly tell a lonely 15-year-old: That needs very careful handling. Because the most engaging AI companion and the healthiest AI companion might not be the same product. That's the original tension I think regulators, founders and parents need to start thinking about now. Not in five years. Now... There Is Also an ENORMOUS Business Opportunity HereBecause this is Startup Networks and inevitably my brain comes back to founders.... Look at everything sitting around this problem. Age-assurance technology. Child-safe AI models. Teacher dashboards. AI literacy products. School integration. Homework verification. Safeguarding systems. Parental controls. AI-powered tutoring. Tools that identify overdependence. Classroom assessment systems designed for a world where every student has an AI assistant. We spent twenty years building education technology around the internet. We're about to rebuild a lot of it around AI. And I'd be very surprised if OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are allowed to own all of that uncontested. There will be startups built specifically around safe AI for children. Others around teachers. Others around parents. Others around verifying whether somebody understands something rather than whether they can produce the correct answer. That last one might be the really big opportunity. Because AI potentially breaks the traditional relationship between work produced and knowledge possessed. A teenager can now produce an incredible essay on Tudor England while knowing absolutely nothing about Henry VIII. So how do you assess the human? Or, perhaps more intelligently.... Why are we still assessing them in exactly the same way? That's a question education systems are going to have to answer VERY quickly. I'm Hopeful About This. With a Giant Asterisk.I think teenagers should have access to AI. There. I've said it. I think trying to ban it completely would be pointless, probably counterproductive and leave young people less prepared for a world where AI will almost certainly be embedded into universities, workplaces, software and everyday life. But that doesn't mean giving a 13-year-old the exact same AI experience as a 35-year-old is sensible either. OpenAI's teen approach feels like a recognition of something the tech industry doesn't always like admitting: Different users need different products. Not just different marketing. Different boundaries. Teenagers aren't tiny adults. They're also not idiots who need a brightly coloured Fisher-Price version of ChatGPT that talks down to them. That middle ground is difficult. And OpenAI won't get all of it right. There will be failures. There will probably be situations where the age prediction gets someone completely wrong. Parents will argue the controls don't go far enough. Teenagers will find ways around restrictions because.... teenagers. Schools will still complain about cheating. And there will almost certainly be conversations an AI handles badly. We should be sceptical. Very. Particularly when the company creating the safety rules also has an enormous commercial incentive to make ChatGPT part of people's lives as early as possible. That tension exists. Pretending it doesn't would be stupid. But I'm also hopeful. Because the alternative to building safer AI for teenagers isn't a world where teenagers don't use AI. It's a world where they use the adult version anyway. Or another chatbot. Or some completely unregulated AI companion built by a company with significantly fewer people worrying about any of this. And THAT worries me more. We're Watching the First Generation Grow Up With AIThis is the bit I keep coming back to. I'm 28... I grew up with Google.... Social media arrived while I was growing up..... Facebook. YouTube. Twitter. Instagram. We had absolutely no idea what those platforms would eventually do to politics, relationships, mental health, attention spans, news, businesses or basically society in general..... We built first..... Asked questions later.... I really don't want us to do that again with AI! The teenager using ChatGPT tonight to revise for an exam might use AI every single day for the next 60 years. Think about that. This isn't another app they'll probably delete. We might be watching the beginning of one of the longest relationships humans ever have with a piece of technology. So yeah.... Making sure that relationship starts with some boundaries seems pretty sensible to me. The interesting bit will be whether those boundaries survive the commercial pressure to make AI more useful, more personal, more engaging and ultimately... more human. Because I want AI that helps teenagers understand the world. I don't want AI that becomes their world. There's a massive difference. And we're going to have to figure it out surprisingly quickly. Quick Facts Product ChatGPT for Teens Company OpenAI Age range 13–17 Launch reported 18 August 2026 Teen protections Stronger safeguards around self-harm, graphic violence, dangerous challenges, body-image content and sexual/romantic roleplay Parental controls Yes Quiet Hours Yes Can parents normally read chats? No Study Mode controls Yes Automatic age prediction Yes Under-13 use ChatGPT's terms generally require users to be at least 13, subject to applicable local minimum-age requirements Questions For Parents Who Didn't Read This Article..What is ChatGPT for Teens?ChatGPT for Teens is an age-appropriate ChatGPT experience designed for users aged 13 to 17. It includes additional safety restrictions around sensitive and potentially harmful content while still allowing teenagers to use ChatGPT for learning, creating, asking questions and other everyday tasks. Can teenagers use ChatGPT?Yes. OpenAI's terms generally allow people aged 13 and over to use ChatGPT, although users under 18 require permission from a parent or guardian and local age requirements can differ. Can parents see their teenager's ChatGPT conversations?Normally, no. Linking a parent and teenager through ChatGPT's parental controls does not give the parent access to the teenager's chat history or real-time conversations. OpenAI may send limited safety notifications in certain serious situations, but says it only shares information necessary to support the teenager's safety. What can parents control on ChatGPT?Parents with a linked teen account can manage settings including sensitive-content protections, Voice Mode, image generation, saved memory, model-training permissions, Study Mode and Quiet Hours. Can ChatGPT tell if someone is under 18?OpenAI uses age-prediction technology that estimates whether an account may belong to someone under 18 using account and behavioural signals. When its system estimates that someone is under 18, additional teen protections can automatically be applied. Does ChatGPT for Teens stop students cheating?No system can completely prevent cheating. OpenAI is instead trying to make ChatGPT more useful as a learning tool through Study Mode, which encourages students to work through questions and concepts rather than simply receiving a finished answer.

Sagtec Global Limited (NASDAQ: SAGT) officially launched its HALO AI food-serving robot today and, basically immediately... announced a $3 million purchase order for 1,500 units from SMD Tech, its exclusive Dubai-based distributor. The robots are intended for deployment across the Middle East and Gulf region, meaning HALO hasn't launched with a tiny restaurant trial or a handful of test units... it's launched with a proper commercial order attached to it! That's quite a launch day. I saw the headline and initially thought..... here we go again.. Another listed company, another product with AI slapped on the front of it, another press release telling us this technology is going to revolutionise an industry. Then I read it properly. Then I did the maths. And actually, there are a few bits of this that are B interesting. Not necessarily for the reasons Sagtec wants investors to focus on either. Dubai-based SMD Tech - FZCO, Sagtec's exclusive distributor in the region, has placed a purchase order for 1,500 HALO AI food-serving robots worth approximately $3 million. Not 20 robots for a pilot. Not a memorandum of understanding. 1,500 actual units. Now THAT gets my attention. First.... $3 Million Divided By 1,500 Is $2,000This was genuinely the first thing I did. $3 million divided by 1,500 robots works out at roughly $2,000 per robot. And suddenly I've got a few questions! Is $2,000 the full hardware price? Distributor pricing? Does SMD Tech pay separately for software, maintenance, AI services, POS integrations or upgrades? Because if it does, the hardware itself might actually be the least interesting part of the economics! Sagtec says HALO could generate additional revenue through software licensing, subscriptions, system integration, maintenance, analytics and future upgrades. If that happens, the model starts looking less like "sell a robot for $2,000" and more like "put a computer with wheels into somebody's restaurant and charge them for the next five years." That's much more interesting. But.... could is doing a lot of work there. We don't know what the contracts contain yet and we definitely don't know what Sagtec makes on each unit. Sagtec Isn't Actually New to This The company launched its wider AI-powered restaurant robotics platform back in June 2025, combining autonomous navigation, restaurant software, AI and POS integrations. It then announced a deal involving more than 100 autonomous units for a Malaysian restaurant group. So HALO feels less like "look, we invented a robot!" and more like Sagtec packaging everything into something it believes can now be repeatedly sold. And I think that's the more interesting story. At Startup Networks we cover SO MANY AI companies with genuinely impressive technology. Amazing demo. Beautiful pitch deck. Funding announcement. Great LinkedIn video. Then..... nothing. Because building something isn't the same as distributing it. Founders obsess over product. Product-market fit. Features. Development. !!Distribution gets a fraction of the attention it deserves!! Sagtec appears to have already built some of that distribution. SMD Tech Might Actually Be the Most Important PartSMD Tech isn't some random company that discovered HALO today either. Sagtec already gave SMD Tech an exclusive master dealership for its Speed+ ordering software in Dubai. That agreement included a commitment for at least 10,000 software licences over five years, which Sagtec previously described as a potential $$30 million revenue pipeline. I actually have two completely opposite reactions to that. On one hand, it's really good. If you've already got somebody selling your restaurant software across Dubai and the Gulf, that's exactly the channel you'd want to use to introduce new hardware. You don't have to build another sales network from zero. You plug another product into the one you've already got. On the other hand, I'm slightly less impressed by the "1,500 ROBOTS ORDERED ON LAUNCH DAY!!!" framing when you realise it's an existing exclusive partner making a larger bet on an existing relationship. It isn't 1,500 restaurants independently seeing HALO this morning and screaming TAKE MY MONEY. Still good. Just different. And that context matters! The $3m Is Quite Big for SagtecSagtec reported roughly $19.1 million in total revenue during 2025, so a $3 million purchase order is equivalent to around 16% of an entire year's previous revenue! Obviously, purchase order does NOT mean $3 million appears in the bank tomorrow. They have to build the robots, deliver them, get them accepted and then actually get paid. But it gives you scale. This isn't Apple announcing a $3m contract. For Sagtec, an order of this size could actually move the numbers. Its filings also show tangible products generated roughly $6.63 million in revenue during 2025 and around $2.17 million in gross profit. Now, DO NOT assume that means HALO has the same margins. We don't know that. But that's exactly what I'd be watching! Because selling 1,500 robots sounds amazing. Selling 1,500 robots and discovering you're barely making anything once manufacturing, shipping, warranties and servicing are included sounds significantly less amazing. Robotics has already learned this lesson. Just ask Zume. We covered how Zume burned through its $500 million pizza robotics dream and honestly, that story should probably be compulsory reading for anyone who thinks robots + food automatically equals an enormous business. Zume had robots. Capital. Hype. Massive investors. The economics still didn't work. Robots are cool. Margins are cooler. But Physical AI Is Getting REALLY InterestingDespite all of my scepticism, I really WANT companies like this to work. We've spent the last few years watching AI mostly live inside a browser. Another chatbot. Another meeting summariser. Another wrapper around a large language model. - We see so many "AI platforms" here.. Physical AI is different. It's one of the reasons we've been following Europe's leading physical AI hubs and where robotics development is actually clustering. A restaurant robot has to deal with reality. Tables move. Children run around. Somebody drops a fork. The Wi-Fi dies. Someone spills Coke on it. A customer stands directly in front of the enormous moving robot despite clearly being able to see it coming. And.... somehow table 14 still expects its chips to arrive hot. That's a much harder problem than generating another paragraph of marketing copy. If HALO AI can genuinely operate reliably inside busy restaurants, hotels, airports and food halls, I think that's really interesting! Dubai Makes SenseThe Middle East makes sense as an early market too. Dubai has huge hotel, restaurant, tourism, airport and shopping centre infrastructure, plus large hospitality operators that can roll technology out across multiple venues rather than buying one unit and seeing what happens. Perhaps more importantly, the region seems willing to actually deploy new infrastructure. That matters massively. You can build the best technology on earth, but if every potential customer says "come back in three years when someone else has tried it first", you're dead. We've seen similar excitement around specialised AI hardware with companies like Olix and its ridiculously fast valuation climb. I keep coming back to the same thought. The next winners in AI probably won't necessarily be the companies shouting AI the loudest. There Are Still Some Big QuestionsOne number in Sagtec's accounts does make me nervous. Three customers represented more than 57% of the company's 2025 revenue. That's a LOT of concentration. One huge customer can accelerate a small company unbelievably quickly. They can also completely ruin your year when they leave. Ask basically any agency founder. So the next HALO announcement I'd actually like to see is slightly more boring. A European distributor. An Asian distributor. A US hospitality group. Then another. Then Another.. THEN ANOTHER! Then, importantly, SMD coming back and ordering more because the original 1,500 actually sold...... There's also another question we don't know the answer to yet: Are 1,500 already allocated to restaurants and hotels? Is one enormous hospitality group taking hundreds? Or has SMD bought 1,500 units as inventory that it now needs to sell through its network? Those are very different things. The announcement doesn't really tell us. And I'd quite like it to. I'm Cautiously Excited About ThisI know I've spent a good chunk of this article poking holes in Sagtec's announcement. That's because announcements like this SHOULD be poked at. But I also think there's something genuinely interesting happening here. Factories. Warehouses. Restaurants. Delivery vehicles. Hospitals. Hotels. Eventually our homes. And that creates an entirely different type of AI company, with manufacturing, supply chains, physical servicing, hardware margins and real-world deployment problems on top of all the software stuff we've spent years talking about. HALO might work brilliantly. Restaurants might hate it. Customers might find the robots annoying. SMD might struggle to shift the 1,500 units. Or six months from now it might come back and order another 5,000. We genuinely don't know yet. But a $3 million purchase order for 1,500 physical AI units from a company that made roughly $19 million last year is absolutely worth watching. Now comes the bit that actually matters... Build them... Deliver them... Put them into restaurants and make sure they don't smash into table 12......... Then make money from them! And then.... Get the second order!! Because the first order gets you a headline. The second one tells me somebody actually wanted what you built. And I REALLY hope they do! Quick Facts Company Sagtec Global Limited Ticker NASDAQ: SAGT Product HALO AI food-serving robot Order value Approx. $3 million Units ordered 1,500 Approx. value per unit $2,000 Distributor SMD Tech - FZCO Region Middle East / Gulf Sagtec 2025 revenue Approx. $19.1 million Announced 18 August 2026 Questions For People Who Didn't Read The Entire Of My Article!What is the Sagtec HALO AI robot?HALO AI is Sagtec Global's food-serving robot for restaurants, hotels and other hospitality environments. It combines autonomous movement with Sagtec's restaurant software and AI technology to help automate repetitive front-of-house tasks. How many HALO AI robots has Sagtec sold?Sagtec announced a purchase order for 1,500 HALO AI robots from Dubai-based SMD Tech - FZCO on 18 August 2026, worth approximately $3 million. How much does a HALO AI robot cost?The $3 million order divided by 1,500 units implies an average order value of roughly $2,000 per robot. That doesn't necessarily represent its final retail price because the order was placed by an exclusive distributor and Sagtec hasn't disclosed the full unit economics. Is the $3 million Sagtec order guaranteed revenue?Not immediately. Sagtec still needs to manufacture, deliver and fulfil the order before revenue is recognised according to the relevant terms. That's why actual deployments and future financial results will be important to watch. Is Sagtec a good investment?I'm absolutely not answering that one for you. It's a publicly traded company and HALO is still early in its commercial rollout. The order is interesting, but I'd want to see actual deliveries, margins, customer adoption and repeat orders before getting carried away. Do your own research. I am not telling you if I invested or not, OR even if you should or shouldn't! This isn't financial advice. Sagtec Global Limited is publicly traded on NASDAQ. Any investment decision should be based on your own research.

Your Flight's Vapour Trail Is Doing More Climate Damage Than Its Engine, and Britain Just Bet £5m on an AI That Can Stop ItNext time you're on a plane and someone points at the window at that thin white line trailing behind another aircraft, here's the thing almost nobody knows. That streak is doing more damage to the climate than the fuel burning in the engine that made it. Not equal damage. More. Contrails, the wispy clouds jets leave behind, are estimated to account for a bigger share of aviation's total warming impact than its direct CO2 emissions. Which, honestly, most people have never heard, I hadn't properly clocked it myself until this story landed on my desk. And now the UK government's put real money behind a stupidly simple idea. What if you could just... not make the trail in the first place. Nudge the plane a few thousand feet up or down and it never forms. What's Actually HappeningThe Department for Transport has committed £2.6m for a 30 month trial with Google, part of a wider £5m programme. The plan, feed Met Office weather forecasts straight into Google's contrail-prediction AI, so pilots and flight planners know, before they even take off, exactly where the cold, humid pockets of air are that turn engine exhaust into a heat-trapping cloud. Small adjustment. Same plane, same fuel, same passengers none the wiser. Just a slightly different line on a map. It's being called a world first, apparently no government has paired a national weather service this directly with AI built specifically to hunt down contrails before they happen. Which, if you'd asked me a month ago whether "world first" and "Met Office" would end up in the same sentence about AI, I'd have said probably not. The Bit Nobody Tells You About FlyingContrails form when hot, humid engine exhaust slams into freezing air at altitude and the water vapour instantly ices onto soot particles. Most disappear in minutes, you've probably watched dozens vanish without a second thought and never clocked it. But some don't disappear. Wrong conditions, and they spread out, merge with each other, linger for hours, and basically act like a blanket thrown over the atmosphere, trapping heat that would otherwise just escape into space. Sit with that one for a second. We've spent a decade arguing about jet fuel and sustainable aviation fuel and carbon offsetting schemes, whole industries built around the CO2 number. Meanwhile the bigger warming problem might genuinely be the pretty white line everyone's been Instagramming out of the window seat. Here's the bit that actually makes this solvable though: only around 2 to 3 per cent of flights are believed to cause most of that warming. You don't need to fix every flight. You need to find the small handful that matter and nudge them. It's a targeting problem. This Isn't a Theory. Google's Already Proven It Works.This is what makes the UK trial worth actually paying attention to, rather than filing it under "government announces initiative, nothing happens for three years" (we've all seen that headline before). Google has run this exact idea twice already with American Airlines and the results aren't easy to argue with. Round one in 2023: 70 flights, six months, pilots flying AI-generated contrail forecasts. Result, a 54 per cent cut in contrail formation. Round two, more recently: 2,400 transatlantic flights, AI predictions built straight into the airline's flight planning software this time instead of running as some side experiment nobody uses. Flights that took the avoidance route produced 62 per cent fewer contrails than the control group. The fuel cost of all that dodging and weaving? Roughly 0.3 per cent, fleet-wide. That number's the whole story really. A 0.3 per cent fuel increase doesn't wreck an airline's economics, it's the difference between "fascinating research paper nobody acts on" and "thing a government could plausibly mandate within a decade." Google's own modelling reckons the climate benefit from dodging the contrail outweighs the warming from the extra fuel burned by something like 20 to 1. Twenty to one. In an industry starved of decarbonisation levers that don't need new aircraft, new fuel supply chains, or a decade of fleet turnover, that ratio's close to a unicorn. What Britain's Version Is Actually TestingThe American trials happened over open ocean at transatlantic cruising altitude, loads of room for a pilot to drift a few thousand feet without anyone blinking. The UK trial's a different animal entirely. It's testing whether this still works over some of the most congested, weather-volatile airspace on the planet, the stack above Heathrow, Gatwick and the wider London TMA, where air traffic control does not have that kind of room to give. That's the real question this trial's answering. Not "does the AI work", we already know it does. It's "does it still work, and still stay cheap, when there's basically no spare sky to play with?" Thirty months gets them through a few winters, which is handy, because cold, humid contrail-forming conditions peak exactly when Britain's grey, damp and miserable anyway. So at least the weather's cooperating for once. The Bit I'm Not Going to Pretend Isn't ThereI want to be straight about two things here, because a good story doesn't need the caveats hidden away in paragraph nine where nobody reads. First, £2.6m isn't a lot of money for a 30-month government trial involving Met Office integration and presumably live airline participation too. Don't go expecting this rolled out across every UK flight the day it wraps up. It's a proof of concept for congested airspace, not a launch. Second, and this one matters more, climate campaigners made a fair point when Google first ran these trials with American Airlines. Tech that makes flying marginally less damaging can quietly turn into an excuse to fly more, and that cancels the gain out completely. Nothing about this trial fixes that tension. Worth watching whether the government's messaging even tries to. I'd rather just tell you that straight than sell you a silver bullet that isn't one. Why This Should Matter to Every Founder Reading ThisHere's what actually pulled me into writing this one up.. beyond the climate angle. It's a textbook example of a funding pattern worth paying attention to right now. A modest, tightly scoped government commitment attached to tech that's already proven, not some speculative moonshot chasing a headline. That's the pattern behind a lot of the most fundable applied AI opportunities we're watching at the moment: narrow, measurable infrastructure problems where you can prove the win in a couple of years, not a decade. If you're building in applied AI or climate infrastructure and looking at where public and private funding is actually landing, government start-up loan schemes and the broader startup loans landscape are worth understanding properly before you pitch anyone. This trial is a small but telling sign of where public money is being pointed. It's also part of a bigger shift towards infrastructure-scale AI rather than another consumer app, the same shift we mapped out when we looked at Europe's leading physical AI hubs. Weather forecasting feeding a prediction model that changes real-world flight paths in real time is about as physical as applied AI gets. What You Can Actually Do With ThisIf you're a founder and this has got your brain ticking over a bit: Go read what's already out there. Google's contrail research is public, American Airlines' results are public too. The gap isn't the science, it's getting it working inside UK-specific airspace and infrastructure, which is exactly the kind of problem a small, sharp team can get ahead of if they move now instead of waiting for someone bigger to. Talk to people already thinking about this stuff. We run regular events and there's a genuinely active UK startup community scene worth plugging into if climate tech, applied AI or aviation infrastructure is anywhere near your radar. And if none of that's you, fine, just keep half an eye on it. Check back around late 2028 when the 30 months are up. Because if a national weather service feeding a proven AI model can genuinely cut warming from one of aviation's most stubborn problems, that's a template every other country with a national forecaster is going to want copied fast. Quick Facts! UK government commitment £2.6m Total programme value £5m Trial length 30 months Partners UK government (DfT), Google, Met Office Contrails' share of aviation's warming impact ~35% (per 2022 IPCC report) Prior Google/American Airlines result 62% fewer contrails, ~0.3% fleet-wide fuel cost Estimated climate benefit vs fuel cost ratio ~20 to 1 Too Long; Didn't Read - Give Me The Answers Pls.What are contrails and why do they matter for climate change? Contrails are the white ice clouds that form when hot, humid aircraft exhaust meets cold air at altitude. Most vanish quickly, but persistent ones trap heat in the atmosphere. Research cited in the 2022 IPCC report puts their share of aviation's total warming impact at around 35 per cent, larger than the industry's direct CO2 emissions. What is the UK government's contrail AI trial? A £2.6m commitment as part of a wider £5m, 30-month trial between the UK Department for Transport, Google and the Met Office. It feeds Met Office weather forecasts into Google's AI contrail-prediction technology to test whether small flight path adjustments can prevent contrails forming over UK airspace. Has this technology been tested before? Yes. Google ran two trials with American Airlines. The first, in 2023, covered 70 flights and cut contrail formation by 54 per cent. A larger trial across 2,400 transatlantic flights, with predictions built directly into flight planning software, achieved a 62 per cent reduction at a fleet-wide fuel cost of roughly 0.3 per cent. Does avoiding contrails use more fuel? Slightly. Diverting around a contrail-forming zone increases fuel burn for the affected flight by around 2 per cent, but because only a small share of flights need adjusting, the fleet-wide fuel impact is closer to 0.3 per cent. Google's modelling suggests the climate benefit outweighs that fuel cost by roughly 20 to 1. Why is the UK trial different from the US trials? The American trials ran over open transatlantic airspace with plenty of room to adjust altitude. The UK trial tests the same technology over far busier, more constrained airspace, and integrates a national weather service (the Met Office) directly into the prediction model rather than relying on generalised satellite data.