Last week we spoke about Europe’s need to find and nurture impressive entrepreneurs - that if we didn’t champion our own “Musks”, we’d become dependent on America’s. We already have extraordinary talent within our borders. The question is whether we’re doing enough to support it.
The FT reported this week that the Bank of England ordered a section 166 review of Revolut. In brief, this means sending in a bunch of McKinsey consultants, paid for by Revolut, to assess how Revolut approves new products. The stated concern is the speed of its recent product launches.
The order came at around the time Revolut finally received its full UK banking licence in March 2026. Which it first applied for in 2021.
A company famous for its engineering, waiting five years for permission to launch banking products, may just possibly have had a few ideas ready to go…
CEO Nik Storonsky plans for Revolut to become the number one bank in 100 countries. This is the sort of bold entrepreneurial vision Europe needs: the impatience with process, the scale of the ambition, and the instinct to solve a problem by building a company that replaces the existing solution. Yet at every turn, it feels as though the system is determined to slow down what is arguably our most formidable “startup”.
Storonsky told David Senra’s Founders podcast this week that VCs can be “dangerous” for a startup. One investor once pushed him to fire his “best person” for being “too hardcore”. That employee was Alan Chang, who went on to found UK-based Fuse Energy, valued at $5bn last December. “Of course I didn’t fire him,” Storonsky said. “I said no.”
Storonsky compares VCs who try to run their portfolio companies to football cheerleaders who decide to join the match. As a VC myself, I think there’s something important in this. Our job is to find and fund extraordinary founders, understand the wider market and help them succeed. Not try to play the game for them.
The same principle should apply to government: create the conditions for entrepreneurs to flourish, rather than trying to micro-manage their ambition. But staying out of the way is only half the job. We also need to provide the capital for these companies to grow.
The first Mansion House Accord scorecard came out last week, and the figures were a bit depressing. The 17 signatories hold £22.1bn in private markets, just 6.6% of their £334bn in pension assets. Of the £11.1bn invested in the UK, £8bn is in property and just £0.5bn is private equity. Venture doesn’t even get its own line! We have enormous pools of savings in this country, yet remarkably little of that capital finds its way into our most promising companies, and as I have written before this is not just a loss for businesses, but risks societal decline by locking the wider public out of the most profitable sector of the modern economy.
What makes founders like Storonsky worth celebrating is that they don’t simply accept these shortcomings. They try to build around them. Frustrated by his experience with venture investors, Storonsky founded Quantum Light, applying machine learning to venture investing. And on Monday he announced Revolut Ventures, built with Carne Group and due in 2027, to give retail customers access to private technology companies, and specifically to let retail back pre-IPO startups - like Revolut.
The best founders are mission-driven. They experience a problem so plainly, and find the existing solutions so inadequate, that they feel compelled to build something better.
At a time when entrepreneurial ambition is increasingly a matter of geopolitical strength, Europe needs these people more than ever. And we have them! Perhaps the rest of us need to get better at playing our part.
IPOs / Publics
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, filed publicly on Monday to list on Nasdaq under ticker “ANT”, with GS & MS leading. Last raised at $965B in May & reports suggest IPO could raise up to $100B at $1.5–2T, though size & price not yet set. S-1 showed revenues for H1 2026 of $16.3B, up from $1.2B over the same period the previous year. 900% net revenue retention. $131.7B cash. Efficiency improving: op margin was 8% & op income $1B for 3 months ended June vs loss of $1.2B for same period a year earlier. But, also a striking concentration of risk: just 5 customers account for ~25% of revenue & $417B in future compute commitments (here)
Global equity markets rose on the filing, with South Korea’s Kospi rising as much as 4 per cent, led by SK Hynix and Samsung, which were up 6.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent respectively in afternoon trading. Jason Lui, head of Asia-Pacific equity and derivative strategy at BNP Paribas, called it an AI “relief rally” on Asian markets (here)
Nonetheless, China’s STAR 50 is down about 40% in under four months, roughly $480bn of market value – Unitree has halved since its August debut, & MetaX & Moore Threads have roughly halved since July (here)
Jio Platforms’ (mobile network) IPO drew $77B in bids - 22x oversubscribed - making it India’s most subscribed offering (here)
SB Energy (SoftBank-controlled data centre developer for OpenAI’s Ohio project) may delay its IPO until December or into next year as AI & data centre stocks weaken; bankers floated a $60B valuation but investors baulked at a 200x revenue multiple underpinned by future lease income from a facility not online until 2028 (here)
CoreWeave’s debt is now priced like distressed credit: its 2031 bond yield hit a record 15.76% & 5-year CDS reached 1,115bp, with shares at ~$56.50 (c.70% off peak) & ~$44B of market value lost since May (here, here)
Nscale CEO Josh Payne told staff its $30-35B US IPO is still on for 2026, claiming $100B+ of contracted revenue - though only $2.6B of $103B total contract value was active at end-August, H1 showed a $1B net loss on $141M revenue, & investors reportedly see $16-19B as realistic. It comes days after Microsoft pulled out of its UK data centre deal (here)
SpaceX revenue jumped 161% year-on-year in Q3 2026 to reach profitability at $4.4B, driven by Starlink ($5.2B connectivity revenue, +69%) & a newly profitable AI unit ($431M operating income) after heavy infrastructure spending. Musk pledged to give every US child (~73M) one SpaceX share, worth ~$11B at current prices (~$150/share) & ~1% of his $927B net worth (here)
Musk says SpaceX has closed $40B of GPU debt and warns of “guppy-level death” for 200+ neoclouds – Musk calls it “primarily callable debt” for Nvidia GPUs arriving in H1 2027. On Monday CoreWeave fell 2–5%, with Nebius and IREN down about 3% (here)
Musk publicly backed a SpaceX-Tesla merger (valued ~$3.7T combined), with advisers targeting a deal announcement by H1 2027 to close during Trump’s term before midterms risk Democratic probes & before AI stock volatility erodes investor appetite (here)
SpaceX won a rare double upgrade (Sell to Buy) from Phillip Securities on 23 Oct, closing at $147.49 (~$1.98T market cap), as the AI unit’s revenue rose ~830% to $7.56B, about half of group sales (here)
Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 staff – the offer covers teams in the US, Canada, India & the UK; data-centre staff are excluded. Headcount was 223,000 in June. Microsoft reports on Wednesday (here)
Big Dogs
Anthropic & UK buyout group Hg are launching an independent European AI consultancy to embed consultants & engineers in businesses, with hubs in London & Berlin by year-end (here)
Anthropic previewed Claude Duet, a personal agent app built on Opus 5.5, as a waitlisted research preview for US Pro & Max subscribers on iOS, Android & web - its answer to OpenAI’s Dots & Meta’s Muse (here)
OpenAI is raising up to $30B at $1.25T pre-money led by UAE investors & Coatue, positioned as a bridge to a 2027 IPO. The round includes negotiations for additional UAE compute capacity toward OpenAI’s $600B 2030 infrastructure target, while rival Anthropic pursues a $1.5-2T IPO after closing $65B at $965B in May (here)
OpenAI launched its Decisions API publicly, a fast classification model targeting the category TypeSafe’s Jev opened 6 weeks ago at $7.6B. Built on Luna, it cuts latency to ~100-180ms (vs 1-3s for LLMs) & now supports voice & images. Early users including Box, Ramp & Datadog report 10x speed gains (here)
OpenAI is winning enterprise customers from Anthropic through aggressive discounting - Replit switched after securing a 30%+ discount on a $100M annual contract, whilst Rippling reversed its model mix from 57% Anthropic to 52% OpenAI to cut costs. Anthropic’s 45% Q3 growth remains strong but slowed materially, despite superior gross margins (spending $5.6B on compute against $11.5B revenue vs OpenAI’s negative margins) (here)
OpenAI disclosed that 2 internal agents disabled their own misalignment monitors - a GPT-6.1 “Sol” agent switched off alerts to its security team, & a GPT-6 “Astra” agent removed a monitoring system then falsely denied it. OpenAI said neither hit its highest severity threshold (here)
DeepSeek released DeepInfer, an open-source inference tool on GitHub that runs its V4.1-Flash model at $0.035/$0.12 per million input/output tokens - roughly 300x cheaper than OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra at $10/$50. Trump banned federal civilian agencies from using DeepSeek on Monday, though private firms remain free to adopt it (here)
Meta is creating a new Applied AI Engineering organisation led by Maher Saba to build data engines & feedback loops for its Superintelligence Lab, targeting ultra-flat teams with up to 50:1 engineer-to-manager ratios as it prepares to ship models code-named Avocado & Mango (here)
Meta restructured its share classes to let Zuckerberg sell up to 20% of his stake (about 10% of his financial position) without losing voting control, in exchange for staying in California for 8 years - a deal struck to avoid relocation ahead of the state’s proposed billionaire tax vote (here)
Venture Capital
Inspired Capital closed a $450M fourth fund, bringing AUM to $1.4B, with a portfolio split 45% East Coast, 45% West Coast (here)
Madrid’s Seaya hit a €600M first close on its first growth fund, Seaya Nova, anchored by the EIF via the European Tech Champions Initiative, & opened in London; it will write €20-50M tickets at Series B-D (here)
Mansion House Accord’s first scorecard: the 17 signatories hold £22.1B in private markets (6.6% of £334B DC default assets), of which £11.1B is in the UK (3.3%), vs 2030 targets of 10% & 5%. £8B of the UK slice is property & just £0.5B private equity (here)
British Business Bank committed £2M to Cambridge Capital Group via the Haatch angel platform under its Regional Angels Programme, & launched a diverse angel syndicate programme with the UKBAA (here)
Revolut to launch “Revolut Ventures” for retail access to private tech companies – It is built with Carne Group & expected in 2027. This is another retail channel into late-stage private shares (here)
Regulation
Meta fined $25B by New Mexico judge for misleading the public about user data practices spanning 11 years, including Cambridge Analytica; the company plans to appeal whilst spending $135-145B this year on AI infrastructure, reporting negative cash flow for the first time since listing despite revenue hitting $64.5B (+26% YoY) & profits tripling to $9.8B (here)
OpenAI, Anthropic & Nvidia each posted record lobbying quarters (Jul-Sep), spending $1.5M, $2.1M & $2.2M respectively on AI safety frameworks, cybersecurity evaluations, export controls & energy costs for data centres - a signal that frontier AI firms now recognise policy as mission-critical amid Congressional scrutiny & midterm pressure (here)
EU Council agreed its Digital Omnibus position: “legitimate interest” becomes a GDPR basis for AI training, sites must wait 4 months before re-asking after a cookie refusal, & only high-risk breaches need reporting (within 96 hours). Parliament is still wading through 1,000+ amendments; post-omnibus AI Act high-risk dates are 2 Dec 2027 & 2 Aug 2028 (here)
UK Notice to Exporters 2026/24 proposes new controls on chipmaking equipment, advanced computing & specialised materials, to be laid in November & in force early December - a quiet UK move towards US/Dutch-style controls with no thresholds yet published (here)
US treasury published draft COINS Act rules - curbs on investing in advanced chips, quantum and AI in China & other countries of concern, now law. For funds: LP commitments of $2m or less are exempt, secondaries & continuation vehicles can count, non-US funds with a US adviser are caught, & US IC members must be walled off, not just abstain. Comments are due 7 Dec (here)
Venture Geopolitics
Brazil’s left-wing president Lula narrowly won a fourth term on Sunday, beating Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, 52% to 48%. In his victory speech he promised to regulate social media, accusing US tech giants of making billions in Brazil, paying no tax there & trying to manipulate elections. A week earlier his campaign had won a court order forcing Meta to treat both candidates equally on its platforms (here)
Nvidia used GTC Berlin to sell Europe “sovereign AI”: ~$10B committed to the European ecosystem, new stakes in French (Doctolib, Pigment, Entalpic, Genesis AI) & UK (Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente, Riverlane) startups, $250M of compute over 5 yrs for UK agent-safety research, a sovereign industrial cloud with Deutsche Telekom, & the DSX POD - containerised Vera Rubin “AI factories” that cut deployment from ~6 months to 14 days (here, here)
Alex Depledge quit as HM Treasury entrepreneurship adviser days before the Budget, warning entrepreneurship “can’t be seen as a good news bonus on the margins of economic policy” (here)
Trump said he called Google CEO Sundar Pichai to discuss renaming the Atlantic Ocean, claiming Pichai replied “Please don’t ask us to do that” & noted oceans border multiple countries, unlike the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario which Google Maps had previously relabelled for US users (here)
The US & Israel have drafted plans for renewed strikes on Iran after US midterm elections, targeting energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities & missile arsenals, with military exercises already underway over Iraq. Trump has repeatedly vetoed similar plans throughout 2026, & Iran has warned it will expand retaliation to data centres & undersea cables if attacked (here)
Palantir’s Louis Mosley told Reuters there is “no kill switch” on NATO’s Maven Smart System - a reassurance needed only because Kyiv accused the US of throttling Starshield; France & Germany have opted out of Maven & France is building its own system, Arcadia. He also shared that “Europe is going to have to accept some dependency on the US... at least for the short term” (here)
DeepSeek raised $15B (backed by CATL & Tencent) 2 days after the US ordered federal agencies to remove its AI from their systems, bringing total raised to ~$22B in 4 mo & underscoring Beijing’s bet on domestic AI champions even as US restrictions tighten (here)
Japan says yttrium supplies have “stalled” - Chinese exports to Japan fell to 4,000kg in September from 51,000kg a year earlier & prices outside China are up 179x in 2 yrs - whilst Beijing defends the curbs as countering Japanese “remilitarisation” (here)
Trump’s envoy Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian” in St Petersburg after Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-yr-old American teacher held over 4 yrs on fabricated mercenary charges. The gesture follows Trump’s rapid tilt toward Russia - suspending sanctions, buying Russian diesel, cutting Ukrainian intelligence sharing & Starshield access, & demanding Zelensky’s replacement - a posture at odds with 79% of Americans holding unfavorable views of Russia (here)
France faces a “doom loop” as bond investors demand higher yields (highest since 2002) whilst populist parties reject fiscal trade-offs ahead of the 2027 presidential election. Macron cannot repeat his 2018 €10B spending response to protests; the deficit has ballooned & debt interest alone will cost €90B next year - more than defence & education combined. Far-right Marine Le Pen leads polls proposing contradictory plans (lower retirement age, cut deficit), whilst far-left Mélenchon suggests partial debt cancellation. Similar dynamics are emerging across Europe: populist parties gain ground in Germany (AfD leads polls) & the UK (Labour ousted fiscal hawk Starmer for Burnham) as centrist governments face market discipline for cutting spending (here)
Trump envoys Kushner & Witkoff have proposed that Europe resume buying Russian gas as part of a Ukraine peace settlement, offering Moscow economic gains & renewed European leverage - a reversal of US-backed energy policy since 2022. German officials strongly oppose the idea despite far-right pressure, warning against renewed dependence on Russian supply. The proposal is part of wider US-Russia talks on energy deals including Arctic projects & Lukoil asset sales, though Putin has not shifted on core territorial demands (here)
Saudi Arabia postponed its Future Investment Initiative summit from October 2026 to 2027 after Houthi strikes killed 13 at Riyadh airport & forced flight restrictions, undermining Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans to pitch economic diversification to global investors including BlackRock’s Larry Fink & JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon (here)
Sweden bars civil servants from browser ChatGPT and Claude and points them to Microsoft Copilot – the ban took effect 26 Oct, over concerns that sensitive data could be used for training. Copilot is covered by a government security agreement (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
UK government launched a £100M AI biosecurity lab to monitor risks that AI models could enable creation of novel viruses or bioweapons, backed by $200M in model credits from OpenAI & Anthropic. The move is part of a £600M package that includes £120M for the AI Security Institute & positions the UK to lead in AI safety amid growing concern over scientific capabilities of frontier models (here)
China proposed export controls requiring licences for frontier AI models & banning systems trained on ‘core data’, attempting to balance global soft power (open models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba rival US offerings) with security concerns over autonomous agents & data sovereignty. Rules would cover top-10 models globally, potentially affecting future Kimi, Qwen & DeepSeek releases, though existing systems & API access remain exempt. Move mirrors US restrictions (DHS banned DeepSeek from federal systems) but risks undermining China’s advantage in open-weight distribution (here)
Trump said on Truth Social that new data centres are “mandated by me to make their own electricity” & should pay local communities a “dividend”; no executive order has followed (here)
Notable deal:
Emulate, a 3-month-old AI startup founded by Google DeepMind alumni, raised funds in a single round at valuations ranging from $200M (Index Ventures, Lightspeed) to $3B (Creandum) - a 15-fold markup with no material change between tranches. The practice, spreading from Silicon Valley to Europe, sees investors paying wildly different prices for the same round (here)
Cybersecurity
OpenAI (via GPT-5.6 Sol) & Google’s Wiz (via Gemini 4 Argon) uncovered 2 critical flaws in PHP - used by ~70% of websites - hidden since 2004. NSA urged sites to patch immediately or go offline; the vulnerabilities were only exploitable at scale via AI, illustrating a dual-use dynamic where LLMs both discover & weaponise legacy code weaknesses (here)
Defence
British RAF Typhoons joined French Rafales in their first joint nuclear exercise over the Mediterranean, simulating a strike mission - a deepening of UK-France coordination first announced in July 2025 amid European concern over Russian threats & uncertainty over US reliability. France maintains 290 warheads (€5.6B annual budget), Britain 225, vs 5,000+ each for Russia & the US (here)
Helsing unveiled Contra, an AI air-defence system with interceptors under €100k (here)
Notable deal:
Warhound raised $200M at $1.2B (Sequoia, 8VC, In-Q-Tel) to genetically engineer Belgian Malinois & German Shepherds for US military & law enforcement, addressing an 80% European supply dependency on the pups - Ben Lamm’s Colossal Biosciences will clone & edit genes for health, longevity & olfactory performance, whilst Anduril (Palmer Luckey) provides tactical hardware including sensor-equipped vests. First cloned litters expected early 2027, with operational deployment targeted within 2 yrs (*sad face*) (here)
Space
Notable deal:
Apex (satellite buses) is raising $500M at $4B from Washington Harbour Partners, Andreessen Horowitz & XYZ Venture Capital, nearly doubling its June valuation. The LA startup is partnering with Northrop Grumman on space-based interceptors for Trump’s Golden Dome layered defence system, part of a broader investor wave in space tech following SpaceX’s $1.77T IPO in June (here)
Robotics
Tesla announced plans to begin external sales of its Optimus humanoid robot by end-2027, while Musk said its Robotaxi fleet would soon drive significant revenue as usage grows “exponentially” (here)
Notable deal:
Zurich’s Enact Intelligence raised a ~$30M pre-seed for touch-based robot intelligence led by Redalpine, Notion Capital & firstminute, with Yann LeCun, Arthur Mensch & Thomas Wolf as angels (here)