Venture Geopolitics Issue 48
19 May 2026
Sir James Dyson and his family lost more money than anyone else in the UK this year. Their wealth fell £8.8 billion, from £20.8 billion to £12 billion. After two decades of continual growth generated by innovation and engineering excellence, Dyson revenues have fallen for the last two years, driven by geopolitical pressures, and “particularly” Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Dyson is one of the few British industrialists left whose wealth is genuinely tied to a productive company: physical products, engineering culture, more than 5,000 prototypes for the first vacuum , thousands of patents, a manufacturing base, a global brand. These solid, meaningful outcomes of “real” entrepreneurialism were just slashed by geopolitical shifts beyond the control of even a businessman of his immense wealth.
Britain likes to tell itself an internal story about entrepreneurship: founders need more ambition, more capital, lighter regulation, better procurement, more risk appetite. The story is not wrong, but it is dangerously incomplete. In the current geopolitical economy, companies also need a state that understands the external levers being pulled around them - and a venture capital class that is alive to the same question.
America has both. The US is no longer merely “pro-business”; it is openly pro-specific-businesses, pro-specific-supply-chains, pro-specific-industrial-outcomes. It uses tariffs, export controls, procurement, equity stakes, tax credits, sanctions and national-security language to bend markets around strategic priorities. See last week’s piece about the US’s increasing control of Europes most valuable company.
Cory Doctorow has brilliantly argued for years against this asymmetry. He argues how American intellectual property and copyright law, built up over decades, has been engineered to give US producers home-field advantage globally - shaping what other countries’ companies can sell, share, license and reverse-engineer, and quietly setting the rules of competition in markets the US doesn’t even produce in. The thumb on the scale is sometimes a tariff. More often it is a clause in a treaty almost no one this side of the Atlantic appreciates.
This week, that thumb became impossible to miss though. Trump landed in Beijing for the first US presidential state visit to China in nearly a decade, trailing what is arguably the most explicitly state-aligned business delegation in modern American memory. Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX) and Jensen Huang (Nvidia, added last-minute via a refuelling stop in Anchorage) flew in alongside chief executives from BlackRock, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Mastercard, Visa, Boeing, GE Aerospace, Micron, Qualcomm and Meta. “We asked the top 30 in the world,” Trump told the room at the state banquet. “Every single one of them said ‘yes.’” On the way out, Nvidia reportedly secured the licences it needed to resume selling its second-most-advanced chips into China, paying Washington a 25% fee for the privilege.
Even American venture capital has now publicly fused with that organism. According to a New York Times analysis, Andreessen Horowitz and its co-founders have channelled more than $115 million into the 2026 midterm cycle - $47.5 million to crypto super-PAC Fairshake, $50 million to AI-focused Leading the Future, $12 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc - making a16z the largest known political donor of this cycle. Marc Andreessen sits on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. A firm that began as a tech investor has become, openly, an instrument for shaping the regulatory terrain around its own portfolio.
Venture Geopolitics has spent 47 issues asking variations of the same question: how do we feed the war machine without becoming it? How do we keep state hands off business otherwise? Those questions assumed a neutral baseline existed. It does not. When the world’s most powerful state has its thumb on every scale, a “neutral” position is de facto no longer neutral.
The cultural pushback has at least begun. This week General Catalyst posted a parody of the old Mac vs PC ads in which a thinly-veiled Marc Andreessen character pitches a robot dog (”Woof AI”) and then kicks it; the dog - surveillance-dog symbolism intact - chases him off screen. 2.4 million views and a fifteen-post Andreessen meltdown later, it is clear there is appetite to name a16z’s behaviour out loud. The execution was clumsy - GC’s own portfolio runs from Anduril to Polymarket, which somewhat undercuts the higher-bar-on-responsibility pitch - but their marketing team is clearly reading the room.
The lesson is not that Europe and Britain should mimic Trump Capitalism. State influence in private markets is a bad thing in principle, and an actively dangerous thing when it metastasises across tariffs, equity, export controls and donor PACs at once. The point is that the principle has already been violated, on a vast and asymmetric scale, by an actor that does not share our interests.
Dyson’s £8.8 billion fall is not a story about one billionaire’s bad year. It is a story about what happens to a country that builds genuinely productive companies and then declines to back them with a state and a capital ecosystem capable of understanding power as clearly as Washington does. Europe and Britain have the founders. They have the companies. What they need is a venture class that backs them with more than money, and a state that supports them with more than rhetoric. If we keep treating that as someone else’s problem and allowing foreign actors to distort the environment, the fruits of their labour will be stolen. Paul Krugman’s recent series of posts say it all: “My message to Europeans is that you’re much stronger than you seem to believe. Act accordingly”.
IPOs / Publics
Cerebras raised $5.5B in its IPO, with shares doubling on debut to reach almost $70B valuation - the AI chipmaker’s massive silicon wafers (58x larger than Nvidia GPUs) attracted partnerships with OpenAI ($20B deal) & Amazon, signalling intense investor appetite for AI infrastructure plays (here). Nb, Arm & SoftBank made an unsuccessful last-minute approach to acquire Cerebras weeks before the IPO (here)
DayOne, spin-off of China’s largest data centre operator GDS Holdings, plans to raise $5B through dual listing in Singapore & New York at $20B valuation, becoming pioneer for Singapore’s new dual-listing rules designed to attract Asian companies amid heightened scrutiny of Chinese firms using Singapore as international expansion base (here)
SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline, targeting a June 12 listing on Nasdaq with ticker ‘SPCX’ - aiming to raise $75B at $1.75T valuation, which would be the largest stock flotation in history (here)
Microsoft is canceling Claude Code licenses for thousands of developers by June 30th, transitioning them to GitHub Copilot CLI instead - a move driven by both financial considerations at fiscal year-end & strategic desire to consolidate around its own tooling (here)
Big Dogs
Anthropic raised $30B at $900B from Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia & Altimeter, nearly tripling its valuation from 3 mo ago as annualised revenues hit $45B - surpassing OpenAI despite shared investors backing both AI labs (here)
Claude Code introduced “goals”, adding a native evaluator model (Haiku) that checks task completion after every agent step, preventing premature termination - a key enterprise pain point where agents decide they’re finished before actually completing tasks (here)
Anthropic published a paper calling for tighter US chip restrictions on China, warning that loosened compute access could create a ‘destabilizing neck-and-neck race’ in AI by 2028 - timing coincides with Trump’s Beijing visit & criticism that the company is using nationalism to fend off competitive Chinese models like DeepSeek (here)
OpenAI reorganised its leadership with Greg Brockman officially taking control of product strategy, consolidating ChatGPT & Codex into one unified experience as the company prepares for a potential IPO later this year amid intensifying competition from Anthropic & Google (here)
xAI launched Grok Build, a coding agent & CLI for professional software engineering, in early beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers - features include plan mode approval, parallel subagents, & deep worktree integrations (here)
Venture Capital / Finance
EQT won the mandate to manage Europe’s €5B Scaleup Europe Fund, beating Atomico, Eurazeo & other top firms in a competitive process that signals Brussels’ push to create homegrown tech champions (here)
1789 Capital, with Donald Trump Jr as partner, expanded assets from $200M to $3.5B in a year by investing in US AI & defence companies including SpaceX, xAI, Cerebras & Anduril, targeting $10B AUM through 'patriotic capitalism' & leveraging Trump family political connections (here)
Bain Capital closed its largest Asia fund at $10.5B, exceeding its $7B target by $2.1B from external investors, with Japan increasingly the region’s most active PE market driven by corporate governance reforms & ageing founders seeking exits (here)
BC Partners secured $2.5B first close for its €5B flagship Fund XII, benefiting from LP allocation shifts towards Europe amid US market volatility & the firm’s strong €18B equity value generation since 2023 (here)
A* closed its third fund at $450M, targeting 30+ startups with $3-5M cheques across AI applications, fintech, healthcare & security - Kevin Hartz’s firm notably backs teenage founders in ~20% of its portfolio (here)
Lansdowne Partners closed $150M for its debut VC fund, targeting $200M final close by December with backing from British Business Bank, Aviva Investors & Lloyds Banking Group - aims to bridge UK university IP to global scale, having already backed 6 unicorns including Oxford Nanopore & Raspberry Pi (here)
Corazon Capital closed $100M Fund IV for pre-seed to Series A investments in AI-native companies that transform human experiences (here)
General Catalyst posted a viral parody video mocking Andreessen Horowitz’s investment approach, depicting an a16z-type character pitching dubious AI startups whilst GC maintained “high standards” - Marc Andreessen responded with multiple tweets, generating 2.4M views & industry-wide commentary on VC firm positioning (here)
Phoenix Court undergoes major restructuring as four GPs depart ‘amicably’ whilst transitioning from founder-led firm to shared ownership model (here)
VR Capital, led by Richard Deitz, has emerged as Ukraine’s largest corporate debt investor with major stakes in Ukrainian Railways & Naftogaz bonds, wielding decisive influence over restructuring talks as state-owned companies struggle with war damage. The hedge fund’s tough negotiating stance - rejecting Ukrainian Railways’ request for a 20% debt haircut - reflects Deitz’s view that maintaining creditor discipline is essential for Ukraine’s future access to international capital markets (here)
HSBC has yet to deploy its $4B private credit commitment announced 11 mo ago, with sources citing wariness over US private credit market volatility following the bank’s $400M loss from Apollo exposure linked to the collapsed UK lender MFS (here)
Regulation
Six European semiconductor startups formed lobby group ‘Voices’ to counter influence of larger chip giants like Intel & TSMC amid €45B EU Chips Act implementation - highlighting tension between established players & emerging innovators vying for policy influence & funding allocation (here)
The Clarity Act passed the Senate Banking Committee with bipartisan support, setting clear rules for crypto trading & custody whilst giving regulators specific authority - banks oppose provisions allowing stablecoin interest payments, fearing deposit flight (here)
Bank of England deputy governor Sarah Breeden signals the central bank will ease proposed stablecoin restrictions after industry pushback, calling initial £20k individual & £10M business ownership limits ‘overly conservative’ & examining alternatives to the 40% central bank deposit requirement that makes UK rules far stricter than US equivalents (here)
OpenAI exploring legal action against Apple over their 2024 iPhone integration deal, alleging Apple has failed to invest sufficient resources in the partnership whilst prioritising competing AI deals with Google’s Gemini models (here)
X committed to reviewing reported illegal hate & terror content in the UK within 24-48 hours following Ofcom probe that found harmful material still accessible on major social platforms, marking the most significant Online Safety Act enforcement since 2023 (here)
Venture Geopolitics
Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch warned French lawmakers that Europe has only 2 years to build independent AI infrastructure before becoming America’s ‘vassal state’, citing US plans to deploy $1T next year whilst Europe lags on chips, energy & data centre capacity (here)
Synthesia policy chief warns EU sovereignty rules could harm startups, saying new regulations aimed at boosting tech independence may have opposite effect by making it harder for European AI companies to compete globally (here)
Andreessen Horowitz has emerged as the biggest donor in the 2026 midterm elections, spending over $115M through crypto-focused Fairshake ($47.5M) & AI-focused Leading the Future ($50M) super PACs, plus $12M to Trump’s MAGA Inc, as the firm transforms from tech investor to political kingmaker (here)
UK government saved millions annually by replacing Palantir’s Ukrainian refugee housing system with an in-house alternative, after contracts grew from free to £10M over 18 mo - highlighting broader concerns about tech sovereignty & vendor lock-in risk (here)
Trump administration considers $1.7B taxpayer-funded compensation programme for allies investigated under Biden, including Jan 6 defendants, modelled on Obama-era Native American settlement & drawing from Treasury’s uncapped Judgment Fund to resolve Trump’s $10B IRS lawsuit (here)
Revolut co-founder Nik Storonsky rose to 7th place on UK rich list with £16.4B wealth, highlighting fintech’s growing prominence as Dyson fell £8.8B partly due to Trump tariffs (here)
USA Rare Earth leads $3B dealmaking spree in rare earths as western companies race to build ‘mine to magnet’ supply chains independent of China, backed by $18.6B in US government funding commitments since Trump’s return - analysts expect only 3-4 western players to achieve scale in the consolidating market (here)
US officials & press threw away Chinese-issued gifts, pins & burner phones before boarding Air Force One after Trump-Xi summit, highlighting operational security concerns around potential surveillance hardware from strategic adversary (here)
EU carmakers fear production disruptions after sanctions hit Yangzhou Yangjie Electronic Technology, a Chinese semiconductor supplier accused of selling military tech to Russia - industry executives are scrambling for information & may seek derogations as up to 3,000 chips are needed per car (here)
Chinese ‘sea turtle’ talent returning from Silicon Valley accelerated in 2025, with recent graduate returns up 12% year-on-year & doubling since 2018, as Beijing offers competitive compensation packages matching US salaries whilst leveraging geopolitical tensions & immigration restrictions to fuel domestic AI, robotics & biotech capabilities (here)
Per the FT, both the US & China seek global leadership whilst avoiding responsibilities - the US maintains competitive China policy through tariffs, export controls & alliance-building, while China struggles to translate perceived American decline into geopolitical gains, with 52 of 70 major economies launching trade measures against Beijing (here)
EU plans to slash steel import quotas by 47% from July, potentially costing Ukraine €1B in lost export revenues as its 2.65M tonnes of annual steel sales to the bloc face 70% reduction - undermining Kyiv’s wartime finances whilst it lacks alternative buyers to replace European markets (here)
King’s Cross has emerged as London’s premier AI hub, hosting Google DeepMind, OpenAI & Anthropic’s new European offices alongside UK startups like Synthesia & Wayve - a £3B redevelopment success story showing how strategic urban planning can create global tech clusters (here)
Krugman challenges the narrative of European economic decline, arguing Europe’s lower GDP per capita versus the US reflects lifestyle choices rather than fundamental weakness - Europeans achieve similar productivity but work fewer hours, while maintaining higher life expectancy & social outcomes than supposedly comparable US states (here)
Xi Jinping warned Trump that poor handling of Taiwan could lead to US-China conflict during their Beijing summit, invoking the ‘Thucydides Trap’ before both leaders emphasised cooperation at a state dinner where Trump invited Xi to visit Washington in September (here)
Revolut co-founder Nik Storonsky rose to 7th place on UK rich list with £16.4B wealth, highlighting fintech’s growing prominence as Dyson fell £8.8B partly due to Trump tariffs (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
Gallup survey finds 70% of Americans oppose data centres being built in their communities, with nearly half strongly opposed - more would rather live near nuclear plants than AI infrastructure facilities (here)
Big Tech companies including Alphabet & Amazon are issuing unprecedented volumes of foreign currency bonds to fund AI infrastructure, with Alphabet alone raising $40B+ across euros, Swiss francs, pounds & yen after having zero foreign debt until last year - driven by $725B collective AI spending leaving the lowest free cash flow in a decade (here)
Google’s AI researchers are leaving to found startups partly due to internal competition for computing resources, as the company prioritises revenue-generating projects like Gemini over experimental research - former DeepMind researchers Andrew Dai (Elorian), Anna Goldie (Ricursive Intelligence), and Ioannis Antonoglou (ReflectionAI) cite better access to computing power & decision-making autonomy as key factors in their departures (here)
Ford shares surged 21% over 2 days as investors embraced the automaker’s $2B pivot into energy storage for AI data centres, with Morgan Stanley valuing Ford Energy at $10B - though analysts warn the rally resembles ‘meme-styled’ speculation vulnerable to quick reversal (here)
Chinese AI firms ByteDance & Kuaishou lead US rivals in video generation quality, training models on vast short-video libraries from TikTok & similar platforms - whilst OpenAI discontinued Sora due to computing costs, Chinese tools enable commercial-scale content creation with looser restrictions (here)
Notion launched Agent Orchestration, allowing any user to work with AI agents through a new External Agents API, with partnerships including Anthropic, OpenAI, Decagon, Cursor, & others for out-of-the-box integration (here)
GitHub launched a desktop app for Copilot in technical preview, creating a unified interface for managing AI coding agents, repositories, issues & pull requests - positioning it against Claude Code & OpenAI’s Codex as the AI coding market shifts towards autonomous agents handling larger development tasks (here)
Notable deals:
Isomorphic Labs (DeepMind spinout) raised $2.1B led by Thrive Capital for AI-designed drug development, highlighting growing US VC appetite for European AI companies with pharmaceutical applications (here)
SAP invested in n8n (workflow automation) at $5.2B valuation, doubling from October’s $2.5B round, as the German software giant integrates n8n’s AI agent tools into its Joule Studio platform to accelerate its AI transformation (here)
Recursive Superintelligence raised $650M at $4.65B with Nvidia & Google Ventures leading, building self-improving AI systems that automate research without human oversight - distinguishing itself from foundation model scalers as Europe’s latest AI unicorn eyes mid-2026 public launch (here)
Junyang Lin, former Alibaba Qwen technical lead, raised several hundred million at $2B for a new AI lab focused on world models & embodied intelligence, joining a wave of elite AI researchers launching pre-product companies at eye-watering valuations despite China’s chip access constraints (here)
SoftBank injected $450M+ into Graphcore, the Bristol-based AI chip company it acquired for $600M+ in 2024, with more funding expected this year as it builds a semiconductor portfolio alongside Arm & Ampere to challenge Nvidia’s dominance (here)
Wispr (voice dictation for developers) is raising $260M at $2B from Menlo Ventures, tripling its valuation from $700M in 7 mo as engineers increasingly use voice to interact with AI agents - a workflow that barely existed a year ago (here)
UK chip startup Fractile raised $220M Series B from Factorial Funds, Accel & Founders Fund to develop specialised inference chips targeting AI query latency - joining hardware race as Cerebras heads for $4.8B IPO (here)
Multiverse (apprentice training) raised $70M at $2.1B, up from $1.7B in 2022, as Euan Blair’s edtech pushes into AI workforce training amid debate over whether AI destroys or enhances jobs - the company posted £79.6M revenue but £62.4M losses in 2025 (here)
Cybersecurity
Anthropic will brief the Financial Stability Board on cyber vulnerabilities exposed by its Claude Mythos Preview AI model, following a request from Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey. Mythos has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across major operating systems & web browsers but remains limited to 40 organisations including Amazon, Microsoft & JPMorgan to prevent misuse (here)
Anthropic’s Mythos Preview & OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber demonstrated powerful cybersecurity capabilities in early testing, with Palo Alto Networks finding 75 bugs vs their usual 5-10 monthly, though models still require human expertise to validate findings & distinguish exploitable vulnerabilities from noise with ~30% false positive rates (here)
UK anti-fraud organisation Cifas found 13% of large enterprise employees sold login credentials or know colleagues who did within 12 mo, with senior executives showing highest acceptance rates (43% of C-suite find it justifiable vs lower-level staff), highlighting critical insider threats as Fortune 500 firms lose employee credentials regularly & face rising account takeover incidents (here)
UK cybersecurity sector generated £14.7B revenue with 17% annual growth, reaching 70,000 employees across 2,603 firms as the Cyber Security & Resilience Bill advances through parliament alongside a voluntary Cyber Resilience Pledge for businesses (here)
Defence
NATO chief Mark Rutte will meet European defence firms including Rheinmetall, Airbus & Saab in Brussels to push for immediate production increases ahead of July’s Ankara summit, as the alliance seeks to hit 5% GDP spending targets & reduce US dependence following Trump’s criticism over Iran war support (here)
UK preparing £6B injection for Global Combat Air Programme stealth fighter jet project with Japan & Italy after Tokyo issued unusually blunt warnings about funding delays threatening the 2035 programme aimed at challenging US military tech dominance (here)
US intelligence indicates Chinese companies are plotting secret arms sales to Iran, planning to route weapons through third countries including African nations to mask origins - revelations that could complicate Trump’s ongoing diplomatic reset with Xi Jinping in Beijing (here)
Anduril & Meta are developing AI-powered smart glasses for soldiers that use voice commands & eye tracking to control drones & identify targets, with the Army’s $159M SBMC prototype due for production consideration in 2028 - though technical challenges around weight, durability & offline AI processing remain significant (here)
Trump’s cancellation of Tomahawk missile deliveries to Germany exposes Europe’s long-range strike capability gap, forcing Berlin to pursue three parallel solutions: begging Washington for purchase deals, partnering with Ukraine on drone technology, and accelerating the European Long-Range Strike Approach programme that won’t deliver until 2030 (here)
CEPS task force outlines three pathways for European defence autonomy: Europeanisation of NATO (taking over US leadership roles), new European multilateralism (including a proposed European Security Council), and EU-led defence cooperation opening programmes like SAFE loans to non-EU allies including the UK (here)
Dutch defence tech startup Destinus is in talks to raise around €200M ahead of a planned IPO, developing drone technology amid growing European defence spending priorities (here)
Notable deals:
Anduril raised $5B at $61B led by Thrive Capital & Andreessen Horowitz, doubling its valuation from $30B in under a year as defence tech attracts VC interest amid geopolitical tensions - revenues hit $2.2B in 2025 with major Pentagon contracts including $20B Army AI deal (here)
Energy
Tech giants including Meta & Amazon successfully lobbied to keep loose clean energy accounting rules for gas-powered data centres, allowing them to claim 100% clean energy coverage through renewable certificates purchased elsewhere despite running on fossil fuels - a decision that could slow emissions reductions by decades compared to stricter hourly matching standards (here)
Space
AT&T, Verizon & T-Mobile announced a JV to pool spectrum for unified direct-to-device satellite coverage, potentially reshaping deals with SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile, AST SpaceMobile & others as T-Mobile’s exclusive Starlink partnership expires this year amid lower-than-expected usage (here)
SpaceX & Google are in talks for launch services as both pursue orbital data centres, an unproven technology central to SpaceX’s pitch ahead of its planned summer IPO - potentially the largest of all time. Google announced Project Suncatcher in 2025 to test satellite-based computing by 2027, whilst SpaceX filed to launch up to 1M satellites for orbital data centres & recently struck a 300MW deal with Anthropic (here)
Crypto
Notable deal:
Elliptic (blockchain compliance) raised $120M at $670M from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, One Peak & British Business Bank, highlighting institutional confidence in on-chain analytics as stablecoins processed $33T in 2025 & digital assets become core financial infrastructure (here)
Robotics
Humanoid signed a deal to deploy up to 2,000 humanoid robots across Schaeffler’s global manufacturing sites by 2032, with initial rollout starting December 2026 at German facilities for box handling & testing operations, marking one of the largest planned humanoid robot manufacturing deployments (here)