The cohort of digital-only banks that entered retail banking from the mid-2010s promised to replace high-street incumbents with mobile apps, transparent fees, and instant account opening. By mid-2024, the sector...
In April 2022, British autonomous-driving startup FiveAI ceased operations. Bosch acquired the business for an undisclosed sum, framing the transaction as an acqui-hire for talent rather than a continuation of...
Former world No. 1 Andy Murray officially retired from professional tennis in August 2024 after the Paris Olympics. But his second act in technology and start-up investing began years earlier,...
By 2018, more than 250 privately held venture-backed companies worldwide had reached a valuation of $1 billion or more. The term unicorn, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee in 2013...
UFOdrive was an all-electric, app-based rental service that operated in several European cities. Founded in Luxembourg in 2018 by Aidan McClean, it let customers book, access and drive a Tesla...
FlexEnable's Organic Liquid Crystal Display, or OLCD, used organic thin-film transistors on a plastic sheet instead of the glass backplane found in conventional LCDs. The Cambridge company, a UK spin-out...
In 2016, Hyperloop One set a public target: a fully operational system carrying cargo and passengers by 2023. The business never built it. It pivoted to cargo-only development in 2022,...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups raised roughly $5 billion in a funding round that closed in the first quarter of 2025. The capital landed as US export controls choked off access...
Blippar, once the UK's most visible augmented reality startup, entered administration in December 2018 after a shareholder blocked an emergency funding round. Its assets were sold in a pre-pack deal...
In December 2023, Virgin Hyperloop permanently ceased operations. The firm, once called Hyperloop One, had raised more than $450 million in venture capital, built a 500-meter test track outside Las...
In 2022 the ScaleUp Institute identified 33,955 scale-ups in the United Kingdom. Those businesses employed 2.6 million people and generated aggregate turnover of £1.2 trillion, a sum larger than the...
The United Kingdom produced five notable artificial intelligence unicorns in the decade after 2010. Every one of them has since been acquired by a foreign company, seen its public valuation...
