The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three UK.
That is some 18 months form when they first revealed their plans back in June.
It’s not entirely clear how that might impact this latest merger attempt, but Smith reckons that deal is as good as dead, regardless of what any court might subsequently find.
“The previous Three/O2 merger is still technically going through the EU courts, but that deal is long since dead in reality,” Smith said.
“We strongly believe that the proposed merger of Vodafone and Three will significantly enhance competition by creating a combined business with more resources to invest in infrastructure to better compete with the two larger converged players,” Vodafone UK CEO Ahmed Essam said in a statement.
Now, Plural itself is scaling up, with a fresh €400 million fund to back what Hogarth refers to as “transformational” startups in the region, bringing more operational know-how to get them running as businesses.
Just six months before, Atomico reported, in its annual survey, that startups in Europe had raised a record $100 billion 2021.
Plural’s €250 million debut fund itself was arguably a product of that: it was actually intended to be €150 million.
Even Plural has sat on some of its money: Hinrikus said in an interview that it’s still making investments out of its first fund.
“[With] AI right now, there’s a huge number of people building businesses that look identical to 500 other startups.
Three councils in the United Kingdom have taken some of their public-facing systems offline due to an ongoing cybersecurity issue.
The NCSC and the three councils declined to say whether the cybersecurity issue relates to an in-house system or an outside vendor.
TechCrunch found that some of Canterbury City Council’s payments systems, provided by EKS, were unavailable.
Dover and Thanet are also both reporting issues with online forms and online payments.
Since 2018, outsourcing giant Civica has provided EKS services as part of a seven-year deal to cut costs across the three councils.
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Interoperability could also be imposed on designated tech giants, the CMA suggested, as well as mandates that they trade on fairer terms.
Algorithmic transparency could be another demand made of them by the new digital markets regulator.
As a consequence the UK has slipped behind peers like the European Union — which adopted its own flagship digital competition reform last year.
The deadline for in-scope tech giants’ compliance with that regime is looming in early March.
A German ex ante digital competition reform has also been operating since early 2021.
Hyperexponential, a London-based insurance technology (insurtech) startup that serves the property-casualty (P&C) insurance industry with “decision intelligence” for pricing, has raised $73 million in a Series B equity round of funding.
Boston-based venture capital (VC) firm Battery Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investor Highland Europe and Andreessen Horowitz (A16z).
Moreover, that Hyperexponential is bringing in high-profile U.S. VC firms points to an international roadmap, with the company confirming plans to expand beyond its current operations in the U.K. and Poland to the lucrative U.S. market.
“We’ve focused on building a capital-efficient, independent business that was both high-growth and sustainable from the outset,” said Hyperexponential co-founder and CEO Amrit Santhirasenan, in a statement.
The company also said that it plans expand into adjacent markets, including SME insurance.
Black founders in the UK are also seeing the impact of venture’s winter year.
That would put 2023 behind 2022, when such founders raised 1.02% ($316 million of $30.88 billion), and 2021, when Black founders were allocated 1.13% ($454 million out of $40.03 billion) of all venture investment in the country.
The downward trend in the share of investment allocated to Black founders most likely stems from the venture downturn of these past two years.
For example, Black founders in the U.K. raised only 0.28% of venture funds in 2019, 0.23% in 2018, and 0.38% in 2017.
Per Extend Ventures, between 2009 and 2019, only 38 Black founders were able to raise venture funding at all in the country; that number now stands at 80.
