Alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, who Microsoft hired from AI startup Inflection AI last week, Hassabis founded DeepMind out of London in 2010.
So it does make sense that the U.K. would seek to honor one of its most high-profile AI figureheads.
Other notable figures from the technology world to receive knighthoods include Apple’s Jonathan “Jony” Ive back in 2011 for “services to design and enterprise.”Delighted and honoured to receive a Knighthood for services to AI.
It’s been an incredible journey so far building @GoogleDeepMind over the past 15 years, helping accelerate the field and grow the UK & global AI ecosystems.
the king or queen at that given time — technically making the final decision on who receives them.
The UK threw a splashy event in New York this week to woo more American VCs Welcome to the new UK: the Unicorn KingdomA 3-D hologram, dubbed the Ever-Changing Statue, will be on display at the Rise by Barclays workspace in New York until April 4.
Dealroom data shows that UK startups raised $31 billion in venture capital in 2022 and $41 billion in 2021.
It’s also still more than the $18 billion the UK raised in 2019 and the $12 billion raised in 2018.
Between 2009 and 2019, only 38 UK Black founders raised venture capital funding—that number now stands at 80, according to an updated report by Extend Ventures.
“The UK tech ecosystem has made significant strides, but work remains to reach the scale and influence of Silicon Valley,” Taylor told TechCrunch.
Bankrupt commercial EV startup Arrival has sold some of its assets, including advanced manufacturing equipment to Canoo, another struggling startup trying to build and sell electric vehicles.
Canoo said the purchased assets, packed into more than 20 container ships, will be sent to the company’s facility in Oklahoma.
The company previously acquired all of the new, and “like-new” assets owned by Arrival’s business unit in the United States.
Arrival announced in January that it planned to sell off assets and IP from its U.K. division after filing for bankruptcy protection in the U.K.
Arrival never produced any commercial vehicles at scale and its market valuation is now around $7.7 million.
The U.K. government has blamed China for a 2021 cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of U.K. voters.
The data breach began as early as 2021 but wasn’t detected until a year later.
Dowden said that a separate attempted cyberattack by a China-backed hacking group targeted the email accounts of U.K. lawmakers in 2021, but that parliamentary authorities mitigated the attempted breaches before any email accounts were compromised.
The Norwegian government previously attributed a 2018 data breach on its systems to APT31.
In 2020, Google security researchers linked APT31 to the targeting of email accounts belonging to the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed that it’s launching a formal “phase 2” investigation into the planned merger between Vodafone and Three UK.
The CMA says that the deal could lead to higher prices for consumers, while also impact future infrastructure investments.
However, the CMA has given both parties a token five working days to address its concerns with “meaningful solutions” before it formally progresses the investigation.
Such a scenario is precisely why the U.K. introduced the National Security and Investment Act back in 2022, with previous form in blocking deals between U.K. entities and Chinese companies.
“This case has more moving parts than the CMA’s other recent big decisions, and is arguably more important for the U.K. economy,” Smith said.
The UK has exited the European Union, but semiconductor development is emerging as one of the areas where it hopes to partner for better economies of scale — and much-needed funding.
The UK itself said it would put up a more modest £35 million ($44 million) in funding for UK efforts over the next few years as part of that.
The Chips Joint Undertaking, for example, has an overall budget of about €11 billion from both public and private contributions.
In December 2023, Pragmatic Semiconductor, another Cambridge-based chip company, raised $231 million at a $500 million valuation.
“We are very happy to welcome the UK to the Chips Joint Undertaking as a participating state,” said Jari Kinaret, Chips JU Executive Director, in a statement.
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago.
Founded in 2015, Monzo provides UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach.
That’s why Monzo is sort of defying the odds with this new funding round, with Google playing a big part in this investment.
Monzo reached a post-money $4.5 billion valuation in 2022.
Now, Monzo has nine million retail customers in the U.K.
Tinder is expanding its identify verification program to users in the U.S., U.K., Brazil and Mexico, the company announced on Tuesday.
The company found that users who completed the ID Verification option saw a 67% increase in matches than those not verified.
Tinder now says that users who only complete the app’s Photo Verification will now receive a blue camera icon badge, while users who only complete the ID Verification will receive a blue ID icon badge.
Users who complete both the ID Verification and Photo Verification will receive a blue checkmark.
It makes sense for Tinder to expand ID verification to more countries, especially as AI scams and romance scams are on the rise.
A coalition of international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, have disrupted the operations of the prolific LockBit ransomware gang.
LockBit’s dark-web leak site — where the group publicly lists its victims and threatens to leak their stolen data unless a ransom demand is paid — was replaced with a law enforcement notice on Monday.
“This site is now under the control of the National Crime Agency of the UK, working in close cooperation with the FBI and the international law enforcement task force, ‘Operation Cronos,’ the message reads.
The group last year claimed responsibility for attacks against aerospace giant Boeing, chipmaker TSMC, and U.K. postal giant Royal Mail.
Monday’s takedown is the latest in a series of law enforcement actions targeting ransomware gangs.
Three local councils in the United Kingdom continue to experience disruption to their online services, a week after confirming a cyberattack had knocked some systems offline.
Robert Davis, a spokesperson for Canterbury City Council, told TechCrunch last week that the council’s initial investigation suggests that no customer data was accessed.
However, the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office told TechCrunch on Friday that the data regulator has received a breach report from the three councils.
Thanet District Council spokesperson Clare Winter shared an updated statement with TechCrunch, which has also been published on the council’s website.
“Thanet District Council is currently limiting access to a number of its online systems,” the statement reads.
