A London startup co-founded by a former Palantir executive has raised $50m to help governments and companies use American cloud and AI without letting America reach inside. The fear driving it stopped being hypothetical this year. Valarian, a London-based sovereignty startup, has raised a $50m (£37m) Series A led by the US venture fund NEA, […]
The European Union and the United Kingdom have jointly sanctioned Russia’s cyber apparatus for the first time. The EU listed nine individuals and four entities, while the UK went further with 24, Politico reports. The language is what matters here. The EU’s High Representative Kaja Kallas denounced not a group but an ecosystem, spanning intelligence services, […]
Tom Blomfield built two of Britain’s best-known fintech companies. Now the Monzo founder is joining Anthropic, and his job is to help crack the AI industry’s hardest problem: compute. One of the biggest names in UK tech is heading to one of the most valuable companies in AI. Tom Blomfield co-founded the digital bank Monzo […]
Chiara Luxardo for BI
When I arrived at Wimbledon's All England Club on Friday, men's semi-final day, security guards and ball boys were arriving for work before the ground opened to the public at 10 a.m.
Britain is spending £2bn to train its army inside a simulation. It has handed the job to an American defence giant, with a German one taking a slice. The UK has signed a £2bn ($2.7bn) contract to train its soldiers with artificial intelligence. The deal, announced by the Ministry of Defence on Friday, runs for […]
Britain’s banks run on four American clouds. The Treasury reckons two-thirds of UK firms lean on the same handful. Now the regulators are stepping in. The UK has named Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle as “critical third parties” to its financial system, as Reuters first reported. The designation takes effect on 13 July. These are […]
Britain’s public sector has become deeply reliant on a small number of US cloud giants, and analysts warn the concentration is now a strategic risk. Nearly all UK government organisations spend on hyperscale cloud, with the dependency running into billions of pounds a year. Some 95% of central and local public-sector bodies spent on hyperscale […]
A serve flashes on the Wimbledon scoreboard before the ball stops bouncing. That number comes from a partnership older than most players on court. IBM has been Wimbledon’s technology partner for 36 years, since it planted serve-speed radar behind the baselines in 1991. This year the two extended their deal to 2030, Fortune reported. The […]
Britain’s tech secretary backs driverless cars and British AI startups. The likely next prime minister’s team has doubts, and her own job is on the line. Liz Kendall wants Britain to back its own AI companies before someone else does. In a Sifted podcast, Kendall, the UK’s science and technology secretary, made a pointed case […]
The last wave of AI learned to describe the world. The next needs to learn how the world pushes back. A Cambridge startup thinks the answer hides inside video games. Worldmodeldata has raised £7m (€8m) to turn gameplay into AI training data, Tech Funding News reported. London’s Iona Star Capital led the seed round. Lord […]
