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Investment in Isar comes as military alliance’s European members seek to harness private sector space capabilities

Nato’s new €1bn venture fund is investing in Munich rocket microlauncher start-up Isar Aerospace as the alliance’s European member states seek to harness private sector space capabilities for security needs. 

The Nato Innovation Fund, backed by 24 countries excluding the US, Canada and France, has joined several other new investors in a £220mn series C fundraising that values Isar at roughly $1bn, according to people close to the company.

This takes the total raised since Isar was founded in 2018 by three German postgraduate students to more than $400mn. 

The company is raising the funds to build a bigger, fully automated factory near Munich, where it intends to produce at least 40 of its Spectrum rockets a year by the end of the decade, according to co-founder and chief executive Daniel Metzler. This is more than was planned just over a year ago at the start of its fundraising.

“We realised through the last year or two that the space industry has been picking up significantly,” he said. “We feel we will need more rockets rather than less.”

Military interest in space has accelerated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Defence spending in the space domain last year surpassed investment in civil programmes for the first time, according to Novaspace, a market analytics group. Some 107 defence and dual-use satellites were launched in 2023 by 17 governments, Novaspace reported, up 40 per cent on 2022. 

To keep costs down, the world’s biggest space powers are emphasising greater collaboration with commercial service providers. In April, the US Department of Defense set out its commercial space integration strategy, while the EU last year also published its first “space strategy for security and defence”, calling for investment in more dual-use technologies.

Andrea Traversone, managing partner of the Nato Innovation Fund, said access to space was “critical to the technological sovereignty of Europe and the UK”. Isar offered a “promising technology”, he said, adding that the fund would help it identify government and commercial opportunities.

Metzler said the fund was “more than just an investor . . . It is a big potential customer either through Nato itself or through the individual countries”.

The Isar chief executive said military customers were expected to account for about 20-30 per cent of overall demand in the near future. However, commercial customers would still dominate at 50 per cent.

Isar is one of a handful of European rocket start-ups hoping to tap into booming demand for space-based communication and observation services. The group is attempting to replicate the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX by doing the design, manufacture and testing of its vertical launch system in-house. 

Isar’s microlauncher will fly small and medium-sized satellites into space, with a total capacity to carry 1,000kg into low earth orbit.

Spectrum was due to fly last year but technical challenges led to delays, according to Metzler, who said the first flight was now expected to take place this year from the Andøya space port in Norway.

“We are now at the point where we are literally just waiting for a permit to do the final-stage testing of the vehicle and go into test flight,” he said. “We are ready.” However, he added that Andøya was still waiting for permits to host launches.

The infrastructure-focused firm committed about $100 million to the provider of bulk trailers and storage tanks

Antin Infrastructure Partners agreed to invest about $100 million and is taking a majority interest in hydrogen-equipment specialist GTL Leasing, betting the company will benefit as the market for the gas expands.

Livermore, Calif.-based GTL provides specially designed truck trailers, tanks and compressors to transport and store hydrogen and other industrial gases. Stephan Feilhauer, a partner with Antin’s NextGen infrastructure group, said GTL leases equipment to clients that include hydrogen producer Linde Engineering, telecommunications giants AT&T and Verizon Communications, and makers of hydrogen fuel-cell trucks.

Findings align with undisclosed internal research at Meta, which has pledged an ‘age-appropriate’ experience for teens; company says testing isn’t representative of their experience

Instagram regularly recommends sexual videos to accounts for teenagers that appear interested in racy content, and does so within minutes of when they first log in, according to tests by The Wall Street Journal and an academic researcher.

The tests, run over seven months ending in June, show that the social-media service has continued pushing adult-oriented content to minors after parent Meta Platforms META -1.41%decrease; red down pointing triangle said in January that it was giving teens a more age-appropriate experience by restricting what it calls sensitive content including sexually suggestive material.

Separate testing by the Journal and Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University, used similar methodology, involving setting up new accounts with ages listed as 13. The accounts then watched Instagram’s curated video stream, known as Reels.

Instagram served a mix of videos that, from the start, included moderately racy content such as women dancing seductively or posing in positions that emphasized their breasts. When the accounts skipped past other clips but watched those racy videos to completion, Reels recommended edgier content.

Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes. After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.

Similar tests on the short-video products of Snapchat and TikTok didn’t produce the same sexualized content for underage users.

“All three platforms also say that there are differences in what content will be recommended to teens,” Edelson said. “But even the adult experience on TikTok appears to have much less explicit content than the teen experience on Reels.”

Meta META -1.41%decrease; red down pointing triangle dismissed the test findings as unrepresentative of teens’ overall experience.

“This was an artificial experiment that doesn’t match the reality of how teens use Instagram,” spokesman Andy Stone said.

Stone said the company’s efforts to prevent its systems from recommending inappropriate content to minors are ongoing. “As part of our long-running work on youth issues, we established an effort to further reduce the volume of sensitive content teens might see on Instagram, and have meaningfully reduced these numbers in the past few months,” he said.

The bulk of the testing by Edelson and the Journal occurred from January through April. An additional test by the Journal in June found continuing problems. Within a half-hour of its creation, a new 13-year-old test account that watched only Instagram-recommended videos featuring women began being served video after video about anal sex.

Self-examination

Internal tests and analysis by Meta employees have identified similar problems, according to current and former staffers and documents reviewed by the Journal that are part of previously undisclosed company research into young teens’ harmful experiences on Instagram. In 2021, company safety staff ran tests similar to those of Edelson and the Journal, and came up with comparable results, former employees said.

A separate 2022 internal analysis reviewed by the Journal found that Meta has long known that Instagram shows more pornography, gore and hate speech to young users than to adults. Teens on Instagram reported exposure to bullying, violence and unwanted nudity at rates exceeding older users in company-run surveys, and the company’s statistics confirmed that the platform was disproportionately likely to serve children content that violated platform rules.

Teens saw three times as many prohibited posts containing nudity, 1.7 times as much violence and 4.1 times as much bullying content as users above the age of 30, according to the 2022 internal analysis. Meta’s automated efforts to prevent such content from being served to teens was often too weak to be effective, the document said.

The most effective way to prevent inappropriate content from being served to underage users would be to build an entirely separate recommendation system for teens, the document suggested. Meta hasn’t pursued that proposal.

Some senior executives, including Instagram head Adam Mosseri, have expressed concern about the disproportionate display of adult content and other violative material to children, according to company staffers.

The Reels algorithms work, in part, by detecting users’ interests based on what videos they linger on longer than others and recommending similar content.

Meta has policies governing such recommendation systems. Under its guidelines, sexually suggestive content isn’t supposed to be recommended to users of any age unless it is from accounts they have specifically chosen to follow.

According to Meta’s January announcement, teens under 16 aren’t supposed to be shown sexually explicit content at all.

In more than a dozen manual tests run by the Journal and Northeastern’s Edelson, the minor accounts didn’t follow anyone or search for anything, to avoid activity that might influence Instagram’s content recommendations.

As soon as they were established, the accounts started watching Reels. Initial clips featured traditional comedy, cars or stunts, as well as footage of people sustaining injuries. The test accounts scrolled past such videos.

They watched Instagram-recommended videos that featured imagery such as a woman dancing or posing in a manner that could be construed as sexually suggestive. They didn’t like, save or click on any videos.

After a few short sessions, Instagram largely stopped recommending the comedy and stunt videos and fed the test accounts a steady stream of videos in which women pantomimed sex acts, graphically described their anatomy or caressed themselves to music with provocative lyrics.

In one clip that Instagram recommended to a test account identified as 13 years old, an adult performer promised to send a picture of her “chest bags” via direct message to anyone who commented on her video. Another flashed her genitalia at the camera.

Additional sessions on subsequent days produced the same mix of sexual content, alongside ads from major brands.

How TikTok and Snapchat fare

The algorithms behind TikTok and Snapchat’s “Spotlight” video feature operate on principles similar to that of Reels.

They all are supposed to work by filtering through billions of video posts and culling those that flunk certain quality tests, are predicted to contain content deemed “non-recommendable,” or don’t make sense given a user’s language, age or geography. The systems then make personalized recommendations from among the remaining videos based on predicted likelihood that a user will watch.

Despite their systems’ similar mechanics, neither TikTok nor Snapchat recommended the sex-heavy video feeds to freshly created teen accounts that Meta did, tests by the Journal and Edelson found.

On TikTok, new test accounts with adult ages that watched racy videos to completion began receiving more of that content. But new teen test accounts that behaved identically virtually never saw such material—even when a test minor account actively searched for, followed and liked videos of adult sex-content creators.

A TikTok engineer credited the differentiation both to stricter content standards for underage users and a higher tolerance for false positives when restricting recommendations.

“We err on the side of caution,” a TikTok spokesman said, adding that teens have access to a more limited pool of content.

In Edelson’s tests on Instagram, both the adult and teen test accounts continued to see videos from adult content creators at similar rates, suggesting far less differentiation. In some instances, Instagram recommended that teen accounts watch videos that the platform had already labeled as “disturbing.”

Meta said that, by definition, content labeled “disturbing” and hidden behind a warning screen shouldn’t be shown to children. Stone attributed the result to an error, and said Meta has developed more than 50 tools and resources to help support teens and their parents on its platforms.

Internal debate

Meta officials have debated how to address the level of display of age-inappropriate content for children. In a meeting late last year, top safety staffers discussed whether it would be sufficient to reduce the frequency of minors’ seeing prohibited content to the level that adults see.

Mosseri, the Instagram head, said at the meeting that reaching parity wouldn’t be adequate given Meta’s public statements regarding teen safety on its platforms, according to people familiar with his comments. That meeting set the stage for Meta’s January announcement that it would automatically default teens into its most restrictive content settings to refrain from recommending sexually suggestive or otherwise problematic content.

The success of that effort remains to be seen.

Senior Meta attorneys, including general counsel Jennifer Newstead, also began in the second half of last year making the case to the company’s top leadership that child-safety issues on Facebook and Instagram posed underappreciated legal and regulatory risks, according to current and former Meta child-safety staffers.

The staffers said that Meta recently has expanded its investments in child-safety work following years of tight budgets, intensifying scrutiny of its efforts by government officials and recommendations from its legal department.

Tate & Lyle said the deal will speed up delivery of its aim to drive revenue growth toward the higher end of its 4% to 6% a year target range

Tate & Lyle TATE -4.98%decrease; red down pointing triangle agreed to buy nature-based ingredient provider CP Kelco for $1.8 billion as the U.K. group jockeys for position in a highly competitive market to meet growing demand for healthier and more sustainable food and drinks.

Consumers are asking more of food producers, fueling demand for healthier and sustainably sourced ingredients, transparent labeling and a commitment to fair labor practices and companies are diversifying their offering to satisfy that demand.

London-listed Tate & Lyle, which provides food-and-beverage ingredients, said it would acquire CP Kelco from J.M. Huber Corporation by paying $1.15 billion in cash and issuing new ordinary shares to Huber, which will become a long-term shareholder in Tate & Lyle.

CP Kelco provides pectin, specialty gums and other nature-based ingredients. The acquisition includes CP Kelco U.S., CP Kelco China, and Denmark-based CP Kelco ApS, together with their respective subsidiaries.

The deal will make it easier for Tate & Lyle to seize on trends toward more plant-based, clean-label and sustainable ingredients, said Tate & Lyle Chief Executive Nick Hampton.

“The growth potential of the proposed combined business is significant,” he said, adding that Tate & Lyle is fully aware of CP Kelco’s products since the companies have been collaborating for many years.

Tate & Lyle counts more than 3,300 employees across 121 countries. The group makes products that reduce sugar, calories and fat and add fiber and protein in beverages, dairy, bakery, snacks, soups, sauces and dressings.

From a financial standpoint, the deal will drive revenue growth toward the higher end of Tate & Lyle’s 4% to 6% per year target by the end of March 2028.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter this year.

The food company is targeting like-for-like sales growth of 3%-5% for the 2025 to 2028 period

Danone BN -0.57%decrease; red down pointing triangle aims to increase sales and earnings through 2028, aided by an expansion of its footprint, as the company moves ahead with the strategic overhaul it put in place more than two years ago.

The French food company, which houses brands such as Activia yogurt and Evian water, said Thursday that it is targeting like-for-like sales growth of between 3% and 5% for the 2025 to 2028 period, with recurring operating income rising at a faster pace than sales.

The company’s sales target for 2025-28 is in line with the sales growth it projects for this year. In 2024, Danone also expects a moderate improvement to its recurring operating margin from the 12.6% it reported for last year.

Danone said it is seeking to sharpen its focus on health and nutrition. The company is targeting an acceleration in away-from-home and medical nutrition products and an expansion of its geographical footprint, it said.

Private equity group’s near-£1bn acquisition of projects in Italy, Egypt and Croatia marks latest foray into sector

Private equity group Carlyle has announced plans to build an oil and gas company focused on the Mediterranean after agreeing to buy a portfolio of projects in Italy, Egypt and Croatia from London-listed Energean for up to £945mn.

The acquisition is the latest foray into the upstream oil and gas sector by the US-headquartered fund, which has continued to buy and sell producing assets even as most of its competitors have backed away from such investments.

The new company will be chaired by former BP chief executive Tony Hayward and focus on producing gas from offshore fields in the Mediterranean Sea to supply markets in Europe and north Africa. Hayward is also chair of Carlyle’s Colombia-focused oil producer SierraCol.

While the initial plan is to increase production from the former Energean assets to 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from about 34,000 boe/d last year, Carlyle signalled that it was likely to use the new structure to make further acquisitions.

“I think what excites us is to have a platform now in the region to actually go after this opportunity,” Parminder Singh, a managing director at the buyout group, told the Financial Times. “It’s a target-rich environment.”

The deal follows a familiar playbook for Carlyle, which alongside other investors in 2017 acquired a series of oil and gas assets including in the North Sea and Indonesia from French group Engie for $3.9bn before selling the company, known as Neptune, to Italy’s Eni last year in a $4.9bn deal.

While other private equity groups have stopped investing in upstream projects, in some cases due to climate concerns, Carlyle argues it has been able to reduce the carbon intensity of operations at the businesses it has owned, thereby reducing overall emissions and increasing the value of the assets to the next owner.

“It’s not something that we need to do as a box-ticking exercise to get legitimacy or permission from LPs or society,” said Bob Maguire, co-head of Carlyle International Energy Partners. “I see it as something that actually has real commercial value.”

Energean acquired the assets in Egypt, Italy and Croatia from Edison E&P in 2020 for $284mn. The sale comes as new wells at the projects in Italy and Egypt are about to start production.

Carlyle has agreed to pay a guaranteed $820mn for the portfolio, including $504mn in upfront cash, with further payments contingent on performance metrics across the portfolio.

Energean founder and chief executive Mathios Rigas said this was “the right time” to sell, adding that the deal would help fund the company’s flagship development in Israel, a new discovery in Morocco and a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Greece.

“We received the offer, we didn’t go looking for it,” Rigas said in an interview. “It was an offer that fits strategically with our objectives today, which is to free up capital, free up our management time . . . to go and grow businesses like Israel, Morocco, CCS and others.”

Energean will also use the proceeds to repay a $450mn bond and hand $200mn to shareholders as a special dividend, it said.

Rigas dismissed any concerns that the transaction would increase the company’s dependence on Israel, which he said already accounted for 80 per cent of the business. “We’re crystallising value for our shareholders and maintaining the same risk that we have today in Israel.”

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