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A total of six companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in May, down from 10 new unicorns in April and eight in May 2023. AI and Web3 companies each counted two, and five of the six new unicorns are U.S.-based.

The largest new entrant was xAI, which raised $6 billion and officially joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in May 2024. The company was valued at $24 billion.

So far this year, around 50 new unicorns have joined the board, adding close to $100 billion in value.

In addition, several companies already at unicorn valuations raised billion-dollar funding rounds at higher values. This includes CoreWeave, Scale AI, Wiz and Wayve. CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion, almost 8x its 2023 valuation of $2.4 billion, due to demand for its AI- driven data center infrastructure.

The majority of unicorn exits this past month were below their last private values.

Hangzhou-based Zeekr, an electric vehicle company, went public on the NYSE at a $5.2 billion value. Zeekr was last valued in 2023 at $13 billion. And Bengaluru-based insurance provider Digit Insurance listed at a $3 billion value on the BSE and NSE exchanges in India, $1 billion below its 2022 valuation.

Global investor Permira acquired a majority stake in Israeli unicorn BioCatch, a biometric intelligence company, for $1.3 billion. This was the single exit above its last private value, a secondary financing in 2023 which valued BioCatch at $1 billion.

API security company Noname Security, based in Palo Alto, California, was acquired by public cloud security company Akamai Technologies for $450 million, well below its $1 billion valuation from 2021. And Israeli parking app Pango acquired London-based ride hailing app Gett for $175 million, a steep discount from its 2018 value of $1.5 billion.

• Elon Musk‘s xAI, a 1-year-old foundation model company based in Burlingame, California, raised a $6 billion Series B funding at a $24 billion value. Participants in the round include Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding Co. among others.
• Bay Area-based WEKA, a data platform for AI workloads, raised a $140 million Series E funding from existing investors. Valor Equity Partners led the funding for the 10-year-old company, which valued WEKA at $1.6 billion.

• Los Angeles-based Farcaster, a decentralized social network built on Ethereum, raised a $150 million Series A. The funding to the 3-year-old company was led by crypto investor Paradigm, with participation from a16z crypto, Haun Ventures and Union Square Ventures among others, valuing the company at $1 billion.
• Humanity Protocol, a blockchain unique identity platform using biometrics, raised a $30 million seed funding led by Kingsway Capital. The company, which was founded less than a year ago, was valued at $1 billion.

• Los Angeles-based Altruist, a digital wealth management service for wealth advisers, raised a $169 million Series E led by Iconiq Growth. The 5-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion.

• San Francisco-based Sigma Computing, a cloud analytics platform incubated at Sutter Hill Ventures, raised a $200 million Series D. The funding for the 9-year-old company was led by Avenir Growth Capital and Spark Capital, and valued Sigma at $1.5 billion.

• The Crunchbase Private Unicorn Company List
• New unicorns in 2024
• New unicorns in 2023
• Unicorns in the U.S.
• Unicorns in Asia
• European unicorns
• Unicorns from LatAm
• Emerging unicorn leaderboard
• Exited unicorns

Companies in fields like financial services and insurance live and die by their data — specifically, how well they can use it to understand what people and businesses will do next, a process that is becoming increasingly dominated by AI. Now, a startup called Finbourne, founded out of London’s financial center, has built a platform to help financial companies organize and use more of their data in AI and other models. It’s announcing £55 million ($70 million) in funding, which it will use to expand its reach outside of the Square Mile.

Highland Europe and strategic backer AVP (the venture arm of insurance giant AXA) are co-leading the Series B, which values the company at just over £280 million ($356 million) post-money.

Thomas McHugh, the CEO who co-founded Finbourne, told TechCrunch that he came up with the idea for the startup after many years of working as a senior quant in the city, most of those spent at the Royal Bank of Scotland. One of those years was 2008, the year that RBS, at that time the world’s largest bank, dramatically found itself on the brink of collapse after being overexposed to the subprime lending contagion.

The major shift played out internally in the form of a huge reorganization.

Previously, the whole of the bank was organized in a series of business silos, which resulted not just in how people operated, but how the data within them operated, too. All of that cost a fortune to run, costs that urgently needed to be cut. “We had to rip hundreds of millions of costs out of the business in a very short amount of time,” he recalled.

They decided to take a page from the nascent but fast-growing world of cloud services. AWS, founded in 2006, had only been going for two years at this point, but the data teams could see that it presented a compelling, and comparative, model for how a bank could store and use data. So it, too, took a consolidated and federated approach to the problem.

“We managed to basically build an awful lot of technology that worked across every asset class. People up until then said this wasn’t really possible. But we had an incredible reason to change and out of that, we knew that we could build better technology, much more scalable technology,” McHugh said. Equity systems, fixed income and credit, he said, all previously run as separate systems, were now on one platform.

The U.K. financial crisis of 2008 was a rollercoaster that, if you were not thrown off completely, you would have definitely walked away from believing that you could weather and take on any kind of challenge. So of course that eventually led to McHugh taking on the riskiest of all things in business: a startup.

Finbourne may have its roots in how McHugh and others on his team met the challenge of building more efficient data services at their bank, but it’s also evolved the idea, reflecting and shaping how financial services companies buy IT today. Just as companies that have extensive sales operations might use Salesforce or a competing platform rather than building their own software, Finbourne’s bet is that financial companies will increasingly do the same: work with outside companies for tools to run their operations rather than building their own.

That is inevitably also dovetailing with how banks and others in financial services are increasingly working with AI.

Today the company’s products include the LUSID Operational data store; investment and accounting books of record (used in asset management analysis); a portfolio management platform that tracks positions, cash, P&L and exposure; and a data virtualization tool. McHugh said that Finbourne is also helping manage how companies handle their data for training models, an area where it’s likely to get more involved.

It sounds like the main takeaways here are that there is no obvious leader, and banks do not want to share data with other banks so are training in ways to keep that from being the case — a process that also helps customers more tightly control results and keep “hallucinations” from creeping into the picture. Open source is playing an important role for how it presents more flexible options to end users.

“What we’ve seen is customers don’t want any of the models we write or use trained on anybody else’s data,” he said. “We see that very strongly. We do it because by not being allowed to use anybody else’s picture, those models are less able to hallucinate.”

Finbourne has a whole range of competitors currently. Asset manager rivals, for example, include Aladdin by Blackrock, SimCorp, State Street Alpha and Goldensource; alternative asset manager competitors include Broadridge, Enfusion, SS&C Eze and Maia. BNY Mellon Eagle, Rimes, Clearwater Analytics and IHS Markit all offer tools for asset owners; and asset services include the likes of FIS, Temenos, Denodo, SS&C Advent and NeoXam.

The fact that there are so many might be one compelling reason someone to take a more simplified approach of working with just one — a route that companies like Fidelity International, the London Stock Exchange Group, Baillie Gifford, Northern Trust and the Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC) are taking.

Self-imposed fiscal constraints risk starving the economy of the investment needed to boost growth

Elections are rarely edifying economic events. Despite the recent arrival of manifestos from the two main political parties, the UK’s seems unlikely to buck this trend. Thus far, the debate on tax and spending policies has been obscured by fiscal fog. At the macroeconomic level, it has established little beyond the narcissism of small fiscal differences. 

On the face of it, these fiscal differences are not insignificant. Under Conservative party plans, tax and spending are both lower than under the latest projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility. Under Labour’s plans, both will be higher. By the end of the next parliament, taxes and spending are projected to be around £25bn higher under Labour than the Conservatives and the tax take as a share of GDP around 0.5 percentage points higher.

In practice, however, this overstates the likely fiscal and macroeconomic differences between the parties. Labour’s proposed additional spending is about one-tenth and one-fifteenth respectively of proposals in their 2017 and 2019 manifestos. The proposed public spending increment is less than a weekend’s GDP under Labour plans, and little more than a long weekend’s GDP under Conservative plans.

So while the distributional consequences — the winners and losers — of the fiscal plans do differ, there is unlikely to be much more than a lettuce leaf between the main parties in aggregate growth terms. This is the logical consequence of them committing to near-identical fiscal rules — in particular the requirement that debt relative to GDP is falling in the final fiscal year. 

These self-imposed constraints are generating difficult fiscal choices which, so far, have largely been ducked by both parties. This has been called a “conspiracy of silence” among politicians. It is worth breaching this omerta to consider which of the available post-election options is likely to be least unpalatable and hence most likely, whoever wins.

Four options are available. By far the least painful and least likely is a spontaneous growth surge. That would immediately relax fiscal constraints and open up fiscal space. It is certainly possible that a reduction in post-election uncertainty could boost business investment and big-ticket household spending.

Whether such a relief rally could be sustained into higher medium-term growth is another matter. The omens are not good. For example, both parties project a fall in public investment as a share of GDP over the next parliament, from a base several percentage points below the UK’s competitors. We can hope private investment fills the gap. But hope is not a growth strategy and private investors might be cautious about rushing in where public investment fears to tread.

Absent the growth fairy, the other options are considerably more painful. Both manifestos implicitly assume existing departmental spending plans are adhered to. With low growth and limited fiscal headroom, these imply sharp real-term cuts in public spending across a range of non-protected departments. This may not be full-fat austerity, but it is no better than semi-skimmed. And it would come against a backdrop of already fragile hospitals, schools, universities, councils, justice and social care systems. In the absence of a visitation from the public sector productivity fairy (also unlikely), this degree of austerity seems unlikely to be politically tolerable.

The alternative means of book-balancing is tax rises — or, more accurately, further tax rises since both parties’ plans envisage a rising tax burden. But increases in main tax rates have been disavowed by both parties. Labour has ruled out rises in income tax, National Insurance, corporation tax and VAT rates, together comprising three-quarters of tax revenue.

Which leaves the final option — waiving the UK’s fiscal rules, notably on debt. That, historically, has been the path of least political resistance, they have been adjusted seven times since 2010. Given the high political and economic costs of the alternatives, modifying the UK’s fiscal rules is once again likely to be the most politically expedient post-election choice, whoever is in government.

Fortunately, it is also the most coherent economic one. Existing fiscal rules risk starving the economy of the very investment needed to boost medium-term growth and, ultimately, pay down debt and lower taxes. So when the UK’s fiscal rules are junked post-election, rejoice rather than lament their passing. It will be an all too rare example of politics and economics aligning. 

French company launches AI strategy as it prepares to split from parent group Vivendi

Havas will invest €400mn in artificial intelligence and data-led initiatives in the next four years as the French advertising agency prepares to split from parent company Vivendi.

Yannick Bolloré, chief executive of Havas, said the initial work on the four-way break up of Vivendi was progressing ahead of a potential listing of Havas next year.

“There are no major obstacles right now,” he said, adding that Vivendi’s management would submit the final plans to its supervisory board, which would then decide whether to go ahead in the coming months.

Under the plans, Havas would be separated into a standalone company, while the other businesses would be media group Canal+, a publishing and distribution company comprising Lagardère and Prisma Media, and an investment company. 

In an interview with the Financial Times ahead of the launch of the new AI strategy — its first major strategic update in 10 years — Bolloré said that no decision had been taken about which stock exchange would be chosen for Havas’s flotation. “It’s still open to debate,” he said.

He declined to comment on the political situation in France, which has been in turmoil since President Emmanuel Macron’s shock announcement that he would dissolve parliament and call fresh elections after his party was routed by the far right in European elections.

Bolloré pointed out that less than a fifth of its business was based in France. This raises the possibility that it could seek the larger pools of capital in the US where rivals such as IPG and Omnicom are based.

The break-up of Vivendi was designed to address the large discount between its stock market price and the value of its assets, he added, and would free the respective businesses to invest more in the future.

“When you look at the stock performance of Vivendi, we are suffering from a huge conglomerate discount — 45 per cent on average — and this conglomerate discount is preventing us from doing big investments.”

Two-thirds of the global media conglomerate’s shareholders would have to vote in favour of the deal. The Bolloré family controls about 30 per cent of the stock.

“We don’t have the two-thirds majority with the Bolloré family. So we need to convince the other shareholders,” he said.

Existing shareholders in Vivendi will be given the same stake in each of the four operating businesses, which means that, initially, the investor list will remain the same. However, Bolloré saw this changing quickly. “We’ll have some shareholders who will sell their shares because they are no longer interested in Havas, and some new shareholders will come and invest,” he said.

On Tuesday, Havas would set out the next part of its “evolution”, he added, including a €400mn overhaul of internal processes and the adoption of AI technology across the group. 

Bolloré admitted that advertising agencies would need to work harder to justify their fees if their clients were able to use the same AI tools that made the more basic roles easier.

“If the client can replicate what we are doing with AI internally, there is no point to work with and to pay a communication agency or companies such as Havas. What I want is having the best tool available for the best talents.”

He did not anticipate any jobs being lost in the adoption of AI, however. “I don’t believe this will create fewer jobs. What’s important with this new way of operating is to make sure that all our people are trained on using these new pieces of technology, these new opportunities.”

Analysts say that having a separately listed Havas would make any future dealmaking easier, such as a merger with one of its rivals. Many ad executives expect consolidation in the industry, with rumours constantly circulating about the possibility of bringing together one or more of the six large operating groups. Havas has been linked in rumours with a potential deal with Japan’s Dentsu as well as Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital. 

Bolloré, who has pledged to remain chair and chief of Havas until 2035, said it was his duty to maximise value for all stakeholders. “By nature, I never say no to any opportunities. But I think the most likely scenario is that we will continue as it is and will continue, I hope, to overperform the market.”

Bolloré said that talk of mergers had continued throughout the decade he had run Havas, adding: “Six players in the industry . . . it’s already very concentrated.”

Europe spurs investment in defence tech start-ups

Head of €1bn Nato fund says geopolitical tensions and conflicts are pushing the region to catch up fast with the US

Investment in defence technology start-ups is picking up speed in Europe, says the head of Nato’s €1bn venture capital fund, who believes the region can produce several potential multibillion-dollar companies to rival those in the US.

The Nato Innovation Fund kicked off its investment programme at the start of this year by backing four start-ups directly, including Wales-based Space Forge with its plans to produce novel materials in space. The fund also put money in four VC funds that focus on “deep tech”, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, space and energy.

Andrea Traversone, the scheme’s managing partner, told the Financial Times that the fund’s aim was to address a “market failure” whereby most traditional VC firms fail to invest in more ambitious, long-term technology.

The Nato fund invests over 15 years in contrast to most VCs, which have to return their funds within 10 years. “We have a significant amount of capital to deploy during these long and capital intensive R&D cycles” for deep tech, Traversone said.

“When it comes to defence tech, the market has grown dramatically over the past three or four years for the geopolitical reasons we all know,” he said, alluding to Russia’s war in Ukraine and rising tensions between the US and China.

The trend started earlier in the US, Traversone said, but Europe is now “catching up very fast”.

The Netherlands-based fund this year also backed ARX Robotics, a German developer of dual-use autonomous ground systems for surveillance and transportation, and invested in London-based Fractile AI, which makes AI systems run more efficiently, as well as iCOMAT, a University of Bristol spinout that is developing lighter and stronger materials for aerospace and automotive vehicles.

The funds receiving Nato capital are Join Capital, Vsquared Ventures, OTB Ventures and Alpine Space Ventures.

Traversone said Europe could soon have a homegrown rival to emerging US champion Anduril, a developer of AI and robotics including drones and surveillance systems that raised $1.5bn at a $7bn valuation in late 2022.

“There are many candidates to become the equivalent of Anduril in the regions we cover,” he said. “And we are investing in some of them. So I am very confident that that is changing and is changing very fast.”

More European entrepreneurs are becoming “enthusiastic” about building so-called dual-use technology, which can be applied to commercial and defence applications, he added.

Many investors, notably in Europe, have been wary of backing defence companies, fearful of falling foul of environmental, social and governance rules.

The war in Ukraine, however, and government investments into capabilities such as drones, cyber and AI which have broader applications, have helped change perceptions of the sector.

In May, the European Investment Bank, a significant backer of VC firms on the continent, opened the door to more deals in defence tech companies by removing a minimum threshold of revenues from civilian applications for dual-use tech companies that receive its funds.

Another factor accelerating investment into defence tech companies is what Traversone described as a “cultural shift” in procurement, typically a slow and laborious process that start-ups have struggled to navigate.

“Ukraine has changed everything,” Traversone said. “Ukraine is showing to all the allies that you can adopt technology and experiment at a much faster pace.”

Recent investors in European defence tech companies include General Catalyst and Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Prima Materia, which have backed German AI developer Helsing. Air Street Capital, meanwhile, led a €6mn seed round in Greece’s Lambda Automata in October.

Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain and Turkey are among the 24 countries contributing to the Nato Innovation Fund, which was first proposed in 2021. The US, Canada and France have not agreed to support it.

As well as investing with a goal of generating financial returns, the fund acts as a “matchmaker” between government buyers of technology and start-ups developing novel products, Traversone said. It plans to invest in areas such as biotech, communications, security and quantum computing.

“The mission of the fund is to invest in disruptive technology that enhances the safety of the alliance’s citizens and Nato’s technological edge,” he said.

Kazakhstan’s Polymetal lives under shadow of sanctions despite Russian asset sales

Gold producer says its European lenders are keen to cut ties once they get their money back despite rebrand

Polymetal, the Kazakh gold producer that recently sold its Russian operations, continues to be haunted by its past in dealings with banks and suppliers, as it seeks to rebuild the business and relist in London in two years.

The former FTSE 100 gold producer has been forced to turn to Chinese suppliers for crucial equipment after western companies refused and to explore alternative financing routes as European lenders, including Société Générale and Raiffeisen, want to cut ties once debts have been repaid.

Polymetal became a rare example of a company to successfully manoeuvre between western sanctions and Kremlin rules on asset sales after divesting eight Russian gold and silver mines for $3.7bn in February to Russian rival Mangazeya Mining, streamlining the group to two Kazakh mines.

The group, which will be rebranded as Solidcore Resources to reduce red flags triggered by the Polymetal name in compliance checks, plans to embark on building its own processing site in Kazakhstan for $800mn and an M&A spree to return to the London market by 2026. The group delisted in 2023 when it redomiciled to Kazakhstan as part of a restructuring following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In an interview with the Financial Times, chief executive Vitaly Nesis painted a picture of a business under siege from its past and present association with Russia, as it faces investor unrest over a policy of no dividends until the processing facility is built in 2028, despite $233mn of net cash.

“Despite a huge cash pile, we find ourselves in a very precarious position. We need to build an expansive and complex facility without access to external financing and with the key source of profitability under the constant sanctions-related threat,” he said. “The picture is not rosy at all.”

“The whole region is now tainted by what has happened and the geopolitical shadow will be there in two or five years,” he added.

Being forced to use Chinese suppliers when building this facility because of refusals by equipment providers in the UK, Germany and France “creates an added level of inconvenience”, Nesis said.

“The industrial reality is we can buy everything in China but we wanted to use the equipment that is already familiar to us,” he added.

Polymetal continues to send material mined in Kazakhstan to the Amursk processing site in Russia that was sold to Mangazeya. It risks a substantial erosion in profitability if it loses access to that processing route and is made to send its unconventional resources, which need to be handled with highly specialised equipment, to China instead.

The US Treasury has sanctioned the Russian assets that Polymetal sold but has provided assurances that the Kazakh entity may still send its material to the Amursk site for processing, subject to certain conditions. 

The Astana-based group has $400mn of debts due in the next 24 months to its lenders, led by Raiffeisen, Société Générale and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Nesis said European banks were keen to cut ties once they get their money back, despite Polymetal complying with all sanctions.

“These banks tolerate the existing facilities as long as we are clear in terms of sanctions compliance. Those banks have next to nil appetite to continue these relationships,” he said. “As we retire those facilities, we have a very tall order of establishing relationships with other banks . . . most likely those will be American banks.”

SocGen and Raiffeisen declined to comment.

The company is also exploring options to tap into funding from the EBRD and renminbi-denominated Panda bonds issued by foreign sellers.

Nesis ruled out an immediate return to London as a “lame duck”. He argued the business needed a market capitalisation of at least $4bn and to be on track to double output to 1mn ounces annually within five years to be meaningful for western investors.

He warned, however, that Central Asian gold miners would never have the same allure after investors suffered huge losses on London-listed Russian gold producers such as Petropavlovsk and Polyus.