Nikolay Storonsky, founder and CEO of Revolut, on stage at the 2019 Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
Harry Murphy | Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
LONDON — British fintech firm Revolut said Thursday it had raised $800 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank and Tiger Global.
Revolut, which offers banking and trading services through an app, is now valued at $33 billion following its latest round, a sixfold increase on the $5.5 billion the company was worth last year.
The latest financing round makes Revolut the second-largest fintech unicorn — a private start-up worth over $1 billion — in Europe, behind buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna, according to data from CB Insights. It is also now the biggest fintech in the U.K., leaping ahead of payments firm Checkout.com.
The fresh cash comes from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and U.S. hedge fund Tiger Global, which collectively hold a less than 5% stake in the company.
Revolut will use the money to invest in marketing, product development and international expansion, Mikko Salovaara, Revolut’s chief financial officer, told reporters Thursday. The firm is heavily focused on ramping up growth in the United States and India, he added.
Fintech start-ups have been on a funding frenzy lately, raising a record $33.7 billion in the second quarter of 2021, according to CB Insights. In Europe, the likes of Germany’s Trade Republic and the Netherland’s Mollie have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
Salovaara said Revolut had no immediate plans for an initial public offering, having just raised a sizable amount of funding. He didn’t rule out an IPO this year but suggested it was unlikely. Last week, money transfer giant Wise went public in London’s biggest tech listing by market cap.
Revolut reported annual losses of £167.8 million ($231.9 million) in 2020, higher than the £106.7 million the company lost in the previous year.
The fintech made £222.1 million in revenue last year. That means Revolut’s new market value is more than 100 times its 2020 sales.
Revolut managed to break even toward the latter half of 2020 and was “strongly profitable” in the first quarter of this year, Salovaara said.
The company is banking on its expansion into new services such as crypto, stock trading and business accounts to reach profitability in the long run, CEO and co-founder Nik Storonsky told CNBC in a recent interview.
A customer holds up the new orange-colored iPhone 17 Pro Max smartphone inside an Apple retail store in Chongqing, China, on September 19, 2025.
Cheng Xin | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The iPhone 17 hit store shelves worldwide on Friday, drawing lines from Beijing to London.
But beyond the launch buzz, Apple is under pressure to prove itself, grappling with questions over its artificial intelligence plans, as well as increasing competition.
Products on display for the first time include the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air, as well as new Apple Watch and AirPods models.
While they were available for preorders in the U.S. from Sept. 12, the global launch holds particular significance as Apple takes on growing competition in overseas markets.
China competition
One of those markets is China, where customers waited for hours — and even overnight — to get their hands on the new iPhone
First in line at the Apple flagship Store in Sanlitun, Beijing, this morning, was Liu — he did not wish to be identified by his full name — who told CNBC that he had been queuing since 11 p.m. local time Thursday for his chance to pick up the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
A customer shows off his new iPhone 17 at Apple’s Regent Street store on Sept. 19.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
He said he was excited about the smartphone’s new color and exterior design, which Apple says has improved the phone’s heat dissipation.
Notably, Liu also said he has changed to Apple from Huawei in recent years, saying he preferred the iPhone for daily use and entertainment.
Another person, who wished to be identified only by his surname, Yang — an erstwhile Xiaomi user — said he had been waiting to get his hands on the latest iPhone, preferring its operating system.
Both Liu and Yang expect many Chinese residents to buy their first iPhone this year due to the new features, including larger internal storage.
If that trend were to pan out, it would be welcome news for Apple, which has lost market share in China to players such as Huawei and Xiaomi.
After years of leadership in the region, the iPhone-maker now only holds 10% of the Chinese smartphone market, trailing local players like Oppo, Huawei, Xiaomi and others, according to data from Omdia.
Apple’s latest iPhone models are shown on display at its Regent Street, London store on the launch day of the iPhone 17.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
So far, the signs are positive for the iPhone 17 series in China. Last Friday, JD.com — one of China’s largest ecommerce platforms — saw the first minute of iPhone 17 series preorders surpass the first-day preorder volume of last year’s iPhone 16 series, the company reported.
At 10 a.m. local time on Friday, JD.com said that iPhone 7 trade-in sales were four times higher than the same period last year.
Other markets
In the much smaller but affluent market of Singapore, the redesigned iPhone 17s were also met with fervor, with long lines forming outside Apple outlets across the city.
Iman Isa and Daniel Muhamed Nuv, two young professionals in Singapore, both queued for hours at Apple’s outlet in the city’s iconic Marina Bay mall to buy iPhone 17 Pros, which they said were their first new phones in years.
Citing the fresh design, longer battery life and improved camera, they said the new phones offer enough to keep them loyal to the Apple ecosystem.
Based on preorder times and consumer feedback, the initial global demand for the iPhone 17 series appears largely positive, said Le Xuan Chiew, a research manager at Omdia.
The iPhone 17 base model in particular has outperformed expectations, as the pricing at launch remained unchanged from its predecessor despite upgrades in memory storage, Chiew said.
In Singapore, customers arriving at Apple outlets had also been looking to nab some of the company’s new AirPods Pro 3, citing the product’s live translation feature as a major selling point.
In London, lines were notably longer than they were at last year’s launch of the iPhone 16, and customers appeared more interested in the premium offerings — the Pro and Pro Max models — this time around.
People lined up outside Apple’s Regent Street, London store on Sept. 19 to get their hands on the latest iPhone 17.
Arjun Kharpal | CNBC
“For the last five years, I’ve been in a pattern of constantly upgrading my phone, because every year Apple is bringing something new to the table,” one customer, Jasmine, said. “I just love having that experience of Apple every year.”
Meanwhile, Michael, who described himself as a content creator, said he was drawn by the battery and camera.
“I thought about going for the [iPhone] Air, but I just don’t know whether or not the battery is going to be able to hold up. And that single camera? I don’t know, it’s just a little bit off-putting on the back,” he said of Apple’s thin iPhone 17 offering.
Apple intelligence
A successful iPhone 17 launch could help reassure Apple investors after a somewhat underwhelming rollout of its artificial intelligence features, which began late last year.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week, Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, lauded Apple’s latest product launches but said the company now needed to deliver on artificial intelligence.
“There is no question that Apple needs to deliver on AI,” he said, noting that the company had “dropped the ball” last year by making big promises that failed to materialize.
“Apple has to catch up [in AI], but right now, I think they’ve got enough runway to be able to cope in the intervening period.”
Co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., Jensen Huang attends the 9th edition of the VivaTech trade show in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nvidia has just shelled out over $900 million to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees at the artificial intelligence hardware startup, and to license the company’s technology, CNBC has learned.
In a deal reminiscent of recent AI talent acquisitions made by Meta and Google, Nvidia is paying cash and stock in the transaction, according to two people familiar with the arrangement. The deal closed last week, and Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar has joined Nvidia, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.
Nvidia has served as the backbone of the AI boom that began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which are generally purchased in large clusters, power the training of large language models and allow for big cloud providers to offer AI services to clients.
Enfabrica, founded in 2019, says its technology can connect more than 100,000 GPUs together. It’s a solution that could help Nvidia offer integrated systems around its chips so clusters can effectively serve as a single computer.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment, and Enfabrica didn’t provide a comment for this story.
While Nvidia’s earlier AI chips like the A100 were single processors slotted into servers, its most recent products come in tall racks with 72 GPUs installed working together. That’s the kind of system inside the $4 billion data center in Wisconsin that Microsoft announced on Thursday.
Nvidia previously invested in Enfabrica as part of a $125 million Series B round in 2023 that was led by Atreides Management. The company didn’t disclose its valuation at the time, but said that it was a fivefold increase from its Series A funding.
Late last year, Enfabrica raised another $115 million from investors including Spark Capital, Arm, Samsung and Cisco. According to PitchBook, the post-money valuation was about $600 million.
Tech giants Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all poured money into hiring top AI talent through deals that resemble acquihires. The transactions allow the companies to bring in top engineers and researchers without worrying about the regulatory hassles that come with acquisitions.
The biggest such deal came in June, when Meta spent $14.3 billion on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang and others and took a 49% stake in the AI startup. A month later, Google announced an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf, and other research and development employees in a $2.4 billion deal that also included licensing fees.
Last year, Google made a similar deal to bring in the founders of Character.AI. Microsoft did the same thing for Inflection, as did Amazon for Adept.
While Nvidia has been a big investor in AI technologies and infrastructure, it hasn’t been a significant acquirer. The company’s only billion-dollar-plus deal was for Israeli chip designer Mellanox, a $6.9 billion purchase announced in 2019. Much of Nvidia’s current Blackwell product lineup is enabled by networking technology that it acquired through that acquisition.
Nvidia tried to buy chip design company Arm, but that deal collapsed in 2022 due to regulatory pressure. In the past year, Nvidia closed a $700 million purchase of Run:ai, an Israeli company whose technology helps software makers optimize their infrastructure for AI.
On Thursday, Nvidia announced one of its most sizable investments to date. The chipmaker said it’s taken a $5 billion stake in Intel, and announced that the two companies will collaborate on AI processors. Nvidia also said this week that it invested close to $700 million in U.K. data center startup Nscale.
— Correction: A prior version of this story mistakenly included the name of a company as an investor in Enfabrica.
CrowdStrike logo is seen in this illustration taken July 29, 2024.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
CrowdStrike shares popped about 13%, a day after the cybersecurity firm issued better-than-expected long-term guidance at its investor day.
The company on Wednesday said it expects net new annual recurring revenues to grow at least 20% in 2027, ahead of analysts’ expectations. CrowdStrike plans for ARR to hit $10 billion by 2031, and then double to $20 billion by 2036.
“CrowdStrike is by far the most advanced security platform in the industry, and the plethora of AI-based solutions announced today will further separate CrowdStrike from the competition,” wrote Wells Fargo analyst Andrew Nowinski in a note following the event.
Some Wall Street firms also boosted their price targets.
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Cybersecurity has taken center stage this year as businesses beef up security in the age of artificial intelligence. Many companies have harnessed AI tools to strengthen their offering as threats rise in sophistication.