TheChek News Flow

Defence investments will create positive spillovers, says Daimler Truck chief

German group brings forward target to 2028 to double its defence revenue to €1bn

The chief executive of Daimler Truck says investing more in defence will create positive spillovers for its business, as the German manufacturer seeks to increase revenues from military vehicles.

Innovations around autonomous driving and faster development cycles were two ways in which the truckmaker could learn from defence partners, chief executive Karin Rådström told the FT in an interview.

“What we’re seeing now in the defence space is a lot of innovation is happening, which we believe will also benefit the civil side,” she said.

German automotive companies have increasingly turned to the defence industry to generate growth and in some cases fill factories left underutilised by falling demand for their vehicles.

Daimler Truck said in June it was investing mid-three-digit-million euros in expanding its defence offering, developing a wider palette of military vehicles and expanding outside Europe.

The company also announced a target to double revenue from defence to €1bn by 2028, two years earlier than a previous goal set in 2025. Daimler Truck generated €45.9bn in sales in its industrial businesses last year but has seen profits slump in the face of higher US tariffs and a slowdown in the North American market.

Rådström said the company’s defence business was developing “faster than we expected” and that the defence industry was growing more quickly than its traditional business.

Daimler Truck had the ability to scale production more rapidly than traditional defence players who were used to manufacturing smaller volumes, she said.

“We have the capacity to really industrialise because, as you know, what all the defence ministries need right now is more capacity and quite fast,” she added.

Militaries were looking to deploy autonomous trucks to increase safety on the battlefield. Trucks with autonomous technology needed fewer military personnel to operate them, Rådström said.

The lower demand for manpower was also an advantage in drawn-out conflicts where finding recruits was difficult, allowing manpower to be deployed in other areas.

The need to operate vehicles in high-risk conflict zones was promoting the adoption of remote-controlled driving and the development of new features such as “platooning”, where several trucks autonomously followed behind a lead vehicle with a driver, Rådström said.

The same technologies could be applied in a civilian context but with different use cases. “There are some overlaps on the learnings that we’re doing now with our defence autonomous projects for the civil side as well,” she said.

With manpower accounting for 40 per cent of the costs for trucking companies, autonomous technology would help profitability for the logistics sector, she said.

“If you can remove 40 per cent of the cost and you can start running the trucks all night, 24 hours, it’s a huge lever,” said Rådström, adding that the addition of autonomous capabilities represented the “biggest change” facing the industry.

The company aimed to start delivering trucks capable of autonomous driving in designated areas in the US next year, with the “big rollout” planned for 2028, according to Rådström.

The German truck group could also learn from the speed at which new technologies were being deployed by defence start-ups, compared with the longer development process in the auto business.

The battlefield was a testing ground for new autonomous technologies, allowing for fast software and hardware development, she said.

“That cycle is so much faster on the defence side now than in the normal way we do business,” she added.

James Dacombe, 25, triples AI chip start-up’s valuation to $3.3bn

British entrepreneur behind Olix raises $312mn from investors including Arm in effort to take on Nvidia

James Dacombe’s AI chip start-up Olix has raised $312mn from investors including Arm, tripling its valuation to $3.3bn in six months.

The company, founded in 2024 by the 25-year-old entrepreneur, has sought new funding in an effort to outpace the many rival start-ups vying to compete against Nvidia in the booming AI infrastructure market.

The London-based group’s new $312mn round is led by New York-based investment firm Fundomo, alongside SoftBank-backed Arm, quant firm Hudson River Trading and Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings.

The deal values Olix at $3.3bn, including the fresh capital raised, up from just over $1bn in February when the start-up raised $220mn.

Dacombe told the FT that the era of a single Nvidia chip handling every AI task was over, arguing “we are moving into a world of specialisation”.

“Today, where there is such an economic prize from being able to run very large powerful [large language models] fast and to a large number of users at a low cost, it really pays to disaggregate and have custom silicon that is good at that.”

Dacombe also serves as chief executive of brain-monitoring start-up CoMind, which he founded as a teenager and has raised about $100mn.

Wall Street anxiety about the scale of increasingly debt-fuelled AI infrastructure spending has triggered a sell-off in chipmakers and memory companies in recent weeks. But private investors continue to pour capital into chip start-ups that promise to unlock faster or more efficient ways of serving AI systems to customers.

Olix’s chip designs do not rely on some of the semiconductor components currently in shortest supply, such as leading-edge silicon, high-bandwidth memory or advanced packaging.

Alongside the funding, Olix has appointed Matt Briers, former chief financial officer at UK fintech Wise, as its CFO.

Olix employs more than 140 staff across its offices in London, Bristol, Toronto and Austin, with many hires joining from US Big Tech groups and semiconductor companies.

It plans to “tape out” its chips later this year, the final stage of the design and testing process before moving to manufacturing. It expects to deliver its first products to customers next year.

Dacombe told the FT that since its last financing, it had “accelerated significantly” in the development of its chips, which it plans to sell as part of a server rack that also includes software and networking equipment.

“The velocity and culture of delivering when you say you will deliver is really key,” he said. “We are on track to be the fastest company to go from founding to full chip tape out of any company in this space.”  

It has made extensive use of AI tools to accelerate development of components such as the compiler that enables AI software to run on its chips. Completing that compiler was a crucial proof point for investors in the latest round.

Speed is vital if Olix is to beat its better-funded rivals to market and meet huge demand from prospective customers at a time when cash is flooding into the market for Nvidia alternatives.

Bristol-based Fractile raised $220mn in May. In July, US start-up Etched closed a $300mn round at a $10.3bn valuation from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, while SambaNova raised $1bn at an $11bn valuation led by General Atlantic.

Olix’s biggest differentiator is its use of “photonic interconnect”, which uses lasers to move data between large clusters of chips faster and with greater energy efficiency.

Lenders signal willingness to offer campaign loans if government guarantees are in place

Several French banks have said they are open to offering campaign loans to candidates in next year’s presidential election if backed by government guarantees, a move that could help Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National overcome longstanding financing problems.

Officials from the prime minister’s office said they met banking executives in July to discuss how to overcome lenders’ traditional resistance to lending to candidates, over what they cast as financial and reputational risks.

Banks have been particularly against funding the RN because of the lingering stigma from its xenophobic history, despite it now being the country’s most popular party.

No agreement has been reached, but the government has said it wants to avoid “foreign interference” if candidates turn abroad for loans.

The issue has become more urgent as the race to succeed Emmanuel Macron approaches next April. Le Pen resorted to a loan from a Russian bank said to have ties to Vladimir Putin in 2017 and a Hungarian lender allegedly close to Viktor Orbán in 2022.

The French Banking Federation said the state was responsible for facilitating campaign loans. Some lenders have said they would only do so with an explicit guarantee that any losses would be covered.

Olivier Gavalda, chief executive of Crédit Agricole, told reporters in comments released on Friday that he supported a pooled approach “which avoids any partisan risk or the appearance of choosing or backing one side or the other”.

“We recognise that failing to finance presidential election campaigns poses a genuine democratic problem for all political parties,” he said. “The right solution is to go through the state, either through public funding . . . or through substantial guarantees.”

Daniel Baal, chair of lender Crédit Mutuel, also said last week a government guarantee was essential.

A person close to another large French lender said not all banks were fully aligned on the idea of a banking pool and said there was much to be thrashed out after the summer.

Le Pen is polling as the frontrunner to make the run-off with an array of candidates, including former prime minister Édouard Philippe and far-left standard-bearer Jean-Luc Mélenchon, competing for the second spot. Philippe has secured a campaign loan from a French bank, as has Mélenchon.

In early July she overcame an electoral ban that stemmed from a conviction for embezzling EU funds and said she would run despite overhanging legal risks from a final appeal.

But the RN has not secured financing despite months of canvassing French and European banks. A senior person who works for the party welcomed the potential compromise with lenders and the government but said it remained “outrageous” that the party was not treated equally.

The RN’s loan from the Russian bank, taken out initially in 2014, dogged the party for years and fuelled concern that Le Pen was under the Kremlin’s sway. Scrutiny of the financial ties between her party and Moscow intensified after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Russian loan was repaid in 2023 and the Hungarian one in 2024.

In France, the state reimburses campaign expenses up to a certain limit for candidates who win more than 5 per cent of the vote. Accounts must also be validated by the elections regulator.

Candidates, even prominent ones, do not always clear these thresholds, which have made banks wary of not being paid back.

In 2022, rightwing candidate Valérie Pécresse unexpectedly only got 4.8 per cent of the vote, while Socialist candidate Anne Hidalgo also fell short with 1.8 per cent, leaving both to foot the campaign bill.

In 2012, regulators refused to pay for Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential campaign expenses because he exceeded spending limits.

Crédit Agricole’s Gavalda said: “When you’re a banker, your duty is to lend money only when you have a high degree of confidence that you will be repaid, and here the uncertainty is simply too great.”

The government emphasised the proposal was not aimed at helping Le Pen. “This is a matter of ensuring the proper conduct of the election: making sure that all candidates can obtain a loan from a French lender to finance their campaign, so that foreign financial networks do not become involved.”

BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Natixis owner BPCE declined to comment.

The Rassemblement National did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Endorsement of the ballot proposal at party meeting comes despite deep divisions among major Democrat figures

LOS ANGELES—California’s Democratic Party has endorsed the state’s proposed billionaire tax, marking a win for its advocates three months before Californians vote on the measure.

At a weekend meeting of hundreds of party officials, the tax proposal on Sunday cleared the 60% threshold needed to overcome objections and win the endorsement, according to a party spokeswoman. California voters will decide whether to approve or reject the ballot initiative in November. If it takes effect, the state’s roughly 200 billionaires would pay a 5%, one-time levy.

The support of state Democratic officials gives the proposed levy a public-relations boost that was far from assured. The tax has sharply divided the party establishment, with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra publicly opposed to it.

The proposal was initiated by a large healthcare union. Several billionaires and some other unions opposed the tax. Both sides mounted fierce lobbying campaigns to sway executive board members at the state Democrats’ meeting this weekend.

“This endorsement puts to rest the idea that California Democrats are not united by the billionaire tax—they are,” said Dave Regan, president of the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West, which proposed the initiative.

Independent polling has shown a strong majority of Democratic voters in California and a narrower majority of the broader electorate support the tax. The SEIU-UHW proposed the tax to try to raise $100 billion aimed mostly at offsetting the Trump administration’s deep healthcare funding cuts.

Progressive leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) have backed the proposal, saying the health funding is needed and that the wealthiest Californians should be paying more.

Newsom, a Democrat seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, has argued that the levy could push the state’s largest taxpayers to flee. Other opponents include the California Teachers Association and California Professional Firefighters.

After the tax initiative qualified for the ballot in June, the governor and his allies fought to persuade the SEIU-UHW to withdraw it. The union at one point offered to withdraw the proposal in exchange for Newsom backing a smaller wealth tax.

The tax would apply to people who resided in California as of Jan. 1 of this year and who have a net worth of $1 billion or more at the end of this year. A person’s net worth excludes certain assets, such as real estate they own directly, for purposes of the tax.

Members of the California Democratic Party’s roughly 380-member executive board gathered this weekend in San Diego to consider various proposals on the November ballot.

In a sign of how divisive the proposal has become in California, opponents and advocates scrambled to whip votes at a waterside Sheraton hotel near the airport.

The union hosted a hospitality suite with food and drinks, and set up a booth where members handed out T-shirts, hats and other swag touting the billionaire tax.

Opponents of the tax paid around $7,000 to cover hotel rooms, registration fees and travel expenses for several voting board members and their proxies, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The payments were made by the “No on Prop 40” campaign via Hilltop Public Solutions, a political consulting firm hired by opponents of the billionaire tax. The No on Prop 40 campaign is backed by the California Medical Association and California Primary Care Association Advocates. The first group didn’t respond to requests for comment, and the latter referred questions to the campaign, which provided a statement from a Hilltop official.

“The No on 40 campaign provided limited travel assistance for a handful of volunteers and supporters who requested help offsetting costs—a common practice for candidate and ballot campaigns,” Marco Meneghin, a principal at Hilltop, said in the statement.

Following Sunday’s vote, a spokesman for the No on Prop 40 campaign called the proposed billionaire tax “bad for our budget, bad for our economy and bad for our future.”

German Robotics Startup Agile Robots Set to Double Revenue This Year

Agile has signed customer contracts underpinning this year’s projected revenue and has so far raised about $1.5 billion from investors led by SoftBank Group

MUNICH—German robotics startup Agile Robots is betting that its manufacturing expertise, not just advances in artificial intelligence, will lead to a surge in revenue and produce profits.

The company’s revenue last year was 300 million euros, equivalent to $345.9 million, and is set to double this year, helping it turn profitable in two to three years, Chief Executive Zhaopeng Chen said in an interview.

“If you look at the numbers, it’s actually not ambitious,” Chen said.

He added that Agile has signed customer contracts underpinning this year’s projected revenue and has so far raised about $1.5 billion from investors led by SoftBank Group 9984 1.67%increase; green up pointing triangle.

Although its humanoid robot have only been deployed in pilot projects, Chen believes today’s industrial business is laying the foundation for a broader robotics market. He expects future physical AI systems to be able to understand and interact with complex environments.

Eventually, he said, robots will become consumer products, occupying a place somewhere between smartphones and automobiles.

“In 10 to 15 years,” Chen said, “seeing humanoids on the street will be like seeing cars today.”

Rather than racing to build a humanoid capable of doing everything from day one, Agile Robots has spent years embedding its industrial robots inside factories to solve problems for their clients.

One of Agile Robots’ biggest advantages is the relationships with major manufacturers enjoyed by some of the companies it has acquired.

Since it was founded in 2018, Agile Robots has acquired more than a dozen companies ranging from idealworks to thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering. Its acquisition of Germany’s thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering, for example, added engineering expertise from the international automotive industry and new core regions to its portfolio.

Chen said around 10% to 15% of new contracts this year are expected to come through acquired companies.

But the acquisitions were less about adding revenue than gaining something many robotics startups lack: decades of factory-floor expertise and trusted relationships with manufacturers.

Any industrial robotics company “with substantial existing revenue and delivered automation projects starts from a different position than a new humanoid startup,” said Poe Zhao, the founder of technology newsletter Hello China Tech. Such a company would already have “paying customers, factory access and integration experience.”

Chen recalled a time when the company worked with one of the world’s largest crankshaft manufacturers in India. When the company set up its robotics system in the factory, they realized that its uneven floor was a huge challenge for its robotics system. But rather than asking the customer to rebuild its production line, Agile redesigned its robotic system to operate under real factory conditions.

Those experiences, Chen said, explain why many robotics startups remain stuck in pilot deployments.

“There are too many layers between the software, down to the earth, to the shop floor,” Chen said.

“Trust is not built by bringing in new technology and saying, ‘I can do everything,’” Chen said. “You have to be a trusted supplier.”

Backed by growing revenue from the industrial automation business, Agile Robots has continued to invest heavily in research and development.

For companies with a strong industrial robotics business, a key question is “whether its humanoid product generates disclosed, recurring revenue from real deployments, and how much of the business continues to come from traditional automation,” Zhao said.

This year, the Agile Robots partnered with Google DeepMind to bring Gemini Robotics foundation models to its robots, giving its hardware more advanced reasoning and decision-making capabilities while using data from real-world deployments to continuously improve the models.

Monte dei Paschi explores Banco BPM takeover after ‘merger of equals’ talks collapse

MPS chief executive weighs approach to Banco BPM’s largest shareholder, Crédit Agricole

Monte dei Paschi di Siena is exploring alternative options to fend off Intesa Sanpaolo’s hostile takeover, including a potential takeover of Banco BPM, after talks over a “merger of equals” between the smaller lenders collapsed on Friday.

According to people familiar with the matter, one of the options being examined by MPS chief executive Luigi Lovaglio instead is an acquisition of Banco BPM, a deal he has long championed.

Lovaglio was considering approaching Banco BPM’s largest shareholder, Crédit Agricole, the people said, although no contact had been made over the weekend and no takeover would proceed if the French bank’s management declined to engage, according to the people.

On Friday, Crédit Agricole’s chief executive Olivier Gavalda said the bank would “analyse any solid project with respect to its strategic interest, execution risk and capacity to create value over the long term for all of Banco BPM’s shareholders”.

But he added that “at this stage, it is very difficult to see how a combination between MPS and Banco BPM can be value accretive for Banco BPM shareholders”.

If MPS did seek to acquire Banco BPM, the potential deal could be structured as an agreed share-based merger negotiated directly with Crédit Agricole, under which MPS and Banco BPM would settle an exchange ratio and the French bank would roll its near-30 per cent stake into the enlarged group, one person said.

Such a structure could limit the cash required and make the transaction easier to execute, but would depend on agreements over governance, board representation, commercial partnerships and Crédit Agricole’s eventual stake, they said.

MPS, which reports its first-half results this week, said in February that it had sufficient excess capital to pursue acquisitions.

The potential move by Lovaglio is the latest twist in a nearly two-month saga that began when Banco BPM approached MPS proposing talks over a merger of equals. The following day, Intesa launched a €30.6bn bid for the Tuscan lender, gazumping BPM’s expression of interest.

Last month, Crédit Agricole raised its stake in Banco BPM to 29.3 per cent. It was Gavalda’s statement on Friday that the French lender had received no information about a potential merger between Banco BPM and MPS, while his deputy insisted that Crédit Agricole’s shareholding made it a necessary party, that prompted Banco BPM to abandon the preliminary discussions with MPS.

In the wake of those comments on Friday, MPS said it “remained focused on implementing its growth plan and integrating Mediobanca, and will continue to assess all strategic options in the interests of all stakeholders”.

Crédit Agricole has signalled that it would welcome a tie-up between Banco BPM and Crédit Agricole Italia.

Lovaglio faces an uphill battle with MPS’s board deeply divided over his strategy. Four directors criticised his approach to dealmaking in a letter last week, while top shareholder Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone openly opposed a tie-up with Banco BPM in an interview with Italian media. 

Because MPS is subject to Italy’s so-called passivity rule while Intesa’s offer is pending, any competing transaction would require approval from shareholders at an extraordinary meeting before the chief executive could proceed.

Deal would create world’s fourth-largest drugmaker by market value

UK drugmaker AstraZeneca is in talks to combine with US rival Bristol Myers Squibb in a deal that would create one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical groups, valued at nearly $400bn.

The companies have held discussions about a tie-up in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks could yield a deal in the near future but may be delayed or fall apart, the people said.

AstraZeneca, the UK’s second most valuable listed company, has a market value of about £196bn ($264bn), while BMS is worth roughly $133bn.

A combination of the two would be among the biggest pharmaceutical deals of all time, and propel the combined entity to become the world’s fourth-largest drugmaker by market capitalisation.

A deal by longtime AstraZeneca chief executive Sir Pascal Soriot would extend the drugmaker’s footprint in the US market. It would also intensify British fears of the UK’s largest companies pivoting away from the country.

The talks come after FTSE 100 company AstraZeneca completed a direct listing in New York in June, in a blow to the London stock market.

The exact structure of any deal could not immediately be determined, but would probably require both cash and shares.

AstraZeneca declined to comment and BMS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

US rival Pfizer made a high-profile bid for AstraZeneca in 2014 that valued the drugmaker at almost £70bn. Those discussions boosted investor sentiment at a time when AstraZeneca was struggling with failures of drugs in late-stage clinical trials.

Soriot was instrumental in rejecting Pfizer’s approach more than a decade ago, and AstraZeneca has grown under his watch to become a powerhouse with a leading portfolio of oncology medicines. BMS also has a large cancer division.

AstraZeneca has set an ambitious revenue target of $80bn by 2030, compared with the $58.7bn it generated last year. That level of growth would depend heavily on the US market, where the company already earns nearly half of its revenues.

Soriot said on a call with reporters last week that AstraZeneca did not “need M&A to deliver” on its 2030 revenue target.

But in recent years the company has been active with licensing deals in China to strengthen its pipeline. Any deal would eclipse AstraZeneca’s 2021 acquisition of rare disease biotech Alexion for $39bn, the largest in its history.

BMS has been earmarked as an industry laggard after its $74bn deal to buy biotech Celgene in 2019 failed to yield the expected returns. It has also had to contend with massive potential losses in revenue from core drugs coming off patent in the coming years.

Any cross-border deal could be contentious. It is likely to face political scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the UK over the possibility of AstraZeneca using the deal to redomicile in the US.

Any combination would come under tough antitrust scrutiny, given that both have large cancer divisions. Evan Seigerman, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said in a note on Sunday that the “significant business overlap” between the pharma groups’ cancer drug portfolios “could reduce the odds of a successful merger”.

Bristol’s Opdivo and AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi are direct competitors as treatments for non-small cell lung cancer, noted Seigerman.

Still, it comes as US President Donald Trump’s administration has shown an openness to dealmaking that has helped push US M&A volumes to near-record levels.

BMS shares have risen 21 per cent since the start of the year, while AstraZeneca has fallen 8 per cent over the same period.

The model could have a big impact because of its improved performance, affordable pricing and low memory requirements.

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek’s release on Friday of a smaller version of its flagship V4 open-source model is causing a stir.

In early tests, the model, V4-Flash, demonstrated capabilities comparable to much larger open-source and proprietary models, and it’s also less expensive than those rivals. People can buy access to it through DeepSeek’s cloud-based application programming interface or download the model and use it on their own servers.

The new V4-Flash model isn’t as powerful as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 on benchmarks, but could tap into a growing market for affordable, smaller models that can power autonomous agents without breaking the bank.

V4-Flash appears to rival OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna and Chinese firm Zhipu AI’s popular GLM-5.2 open-source model, according to Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a comprehensive benchmark for AI models’ capabilities across math, science, coding and reasoning. V4-Flash’s cost per task can be 60% lower than that of GPT-5.6 Luna, according to Artificial Analysis.

DeepSeek is expected to release the official version of V4-Pro, a larger version of V4 with six times as many parameters, or settings in the model, soon.