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Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.

Zopa

LONDON — British digital bank Zopa is beefing up its management team with a couple of senior hires, as the company looks to fuel growth and prepare its business for an eventual public listing.

The SoftBank-backed company, which offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts, told CNBC exclusively it has hired Peter Donlon, the former chief technology officer of online card retailer Moonpig, as its CTO.

The firm has also brought in Kate Erb, a qualified chartered accountant from KPMG with over 20 years of experience in financial services, as its chief operating officer.

Erb was most recently an operations director at Leeds Building Society.

Donlon notably saw Moonpig through its public listing in 2021, which valued the company at around £1.2 billion at the time. Moonpig now trades at a price of £151 per share, which gives it a market capitalization of £518 million, reflecting a broad slump in technology shares.

His appointment reflects a push from Zopa to grow in maturity and ramp up user growth in anticipation of an eventual initial public offering (IPO). Zopa had planned to go public last year, however it put this ambition on ice as the stock market took a turn for the worst with rising interest rates clobbering high-growth tech stocks.

CEO Jaidev Janardana insisted the bank has no plans for an IPO in the immediate term, however he suggested a flotation could be on the horizon by mid-next year were sentiment in the public markets to change.

What will need to change for that to happen, he explained, is for the public markets to open back up.

“We haven’t had great IPOs,” he told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of London Tech Week this week. “I would love to see some successful IPOs actually coming.”

“If you look at kind of banks, and how they’re valued, or tech companies, both of them, public market valuations are not great.”

“The second thing is … liquidity.” he added. “We need to make sure that there is enough liquidity for a public company to be truly public. Shares should be able to be bought and sold reasonably easily.”

Positivity in public markets depends on overall economy strength, ZOPA CEO says

Zopa will soon reach 1 million customers, a spokesman for the company told CNBC. It ultimately wants to hit 5 million users in the coming years. The firm competes with large banks as well as fintechs like Monzo, Revolut and Starling.

Janardana suggested the company could look to ramp up growth of its business through mergers and acquisitions, and a move into other areas of finance including small business loans and open banking, which allows for the sharing of data between banks and third-party firms.

Zopa raised £75 million ($95.9 million) from investors earlier this year.

“We are open,” he said. “Where there is opportunity for us to use open banking, infrastructure, data, to be able to provide holistic experiences to customers is something that has been of interest for us.”

“SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) lending is another thing that is of interest for us.”

Zopa reached profitability on a monthly basis in April 2022. Zopa aims to achieve full-year profitability by the end of 2023.

In terms of the products that Janardana isn’t interested in rolling out, crypto tops the list. The financial executive, who has helmed Zopa since 2014, said that crypto “is not great for the retail consumer today.”

“I’m not a big fan of crypto yet, I’m not convinced,” he said. “It’s a complicated product that people don’t understand, which is why we never offered it.”

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

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Nvidia says U.S. government will allow it to resume H20 AI chip sales to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.

Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.

“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.

This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.

Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.

The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.

Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all. 

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in $2.4 billion licensing deal

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Cognition to buy AI startup Windsurf days after Google poached CEO in .4 billion licensing deal

In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.

Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP

Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.

Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.

OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.

“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”

Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.

Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.

“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”

Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.

“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.

WATCH: Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

Google snatches Windsurf CEO after OpenAI deal dissolves

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Musk’s xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok’s ‘horrific’ antisemitic posts

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Musk's xAI faces European scrutiny over Grok's 'horrific' antisemitic posts

The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024. 

Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.

“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.

X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.

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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.

“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.

Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”

xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.

Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.

CNBC’s April Roach contributed to this article.

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