Traffic passes around the Old Street roundabout, also referred to as “Silicon Roundabout,” in the area known as “Tech City” in London, U.K.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tech Nation, the U.K. startup accelerator program, is set to close its doors after failing to renew its funding from the government, the organization said Tuesday.
The tech industry body said in a statement that it will be “ceasing all existing operations through a carefully planned wind-down and has commenced a redundancy consultation process.”
The group is “actively seeking interested parties to acquire its portfolio of assets to take forward in a new guise,” it added.
Created in 2010 under the premiership of ex-Prime Minister David Cameron, Tech Nation was a hallmark of the U.K.’s bid to create billion-dollar tech companies of global significance and rival the likes of Silicon Valley.
It claims to have helped produce household names in the U.K.’s tech scene, with a diverse range of alumni on its projects hailing from the likes of Monzo, Revolut, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Darktrace and Ocado.
According to Tech Nation, more than a third of all tech unicorns and decacorns created in the U.K. graduated from a Tech Nation program. Tech Nation graduates have also raised more than £28 billion ($35.4 billion) in funding to date.
While 80% of startups fail in their first two to five years, over 95% of startups on Tech Nation’s accelerator programs have gone on to scale, the group said.
Earlier this month, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport awarded its £12.09 million Digital Growth Grant to Barclays Bank. The lender’s Eagle Labs incubator, which operates independently of Barclays, is set to replace Tech Nation as the recipient of the grant.
The government put the contract out to tender last year after raising concerns that Tech Nation was in breach of state aid rules after failing to become “self-sufficient,” The Sunday Times reported.
Tech Nation says the DCMS grant accounted for roughly 62% of its funding in 2021/22. The remainder of its income came from sponsorship, commercial partnerships and other government contracts.
As a result of the move, Tech Nation said its current activities were “not viable on a standalone basis” and would therefore need to be wound up.
For employees whose primary role is government delivery work, Tech Nation has begun discussions with Barclays Bank about transferring those workers over to the lender.
The Home Office has also been notified of the move and its visa program for foreign tech workers “will continue in the immediate term,” Tech Nation said.
The next Silicon Valley?
The move has raised questions over the U.K.’s ambitions to rev up its digital leadership on the global stage following its exit from the European Union. Just days ago, Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt had talked up the U.K.’s chances of becoming the “world’s next Silicon Valley.”
“As an entrepreneur and digital champion, I’ve witnessed first-hand the impact that Tech Nation has had in creating one of the most exciting and dynamic parts of our economy,” Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com and currently president of the British Chambers of Commerce, said in a statement Tuesday.
“The skills they’ve equipped entrepreneurs with and opportunities they’ve created have been second to none. They will be missed.”
It also adds to the woes of the U.K.’s tech sector, which is currently reeling from a global slump in venture capital funding amid fears of an oncoming recession.
On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said the U.K. was the only nation among all advanced economies on track to contract in 2023. Even sanctions-hit Russia is forecast to grow.
“The UK tech ecosystem has today lost an important member of its community,” said Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates, the U.K. tech network.
Total VC funding to startups in the U.K. totalled $29.9 billion in 2022, down 27% from $41 billion a year earlier. Global startup investment sank to $233.3 billion, down 33% from $359.6 billion in 2021.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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