British neobank Monzo said Wednesday that it’s raised another $190 million, lifting the total it’s raised so far this year to $610 million.

The company told CNBC it raised the cash from new investors including Hedosophia, a backer of top European fintechs including N26 and Qonto. CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, also participated in the round.

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC also participated in Monzo’s latest fundraise, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity as details of GIC’s involvement aren’t yet public.

The latest funding values Monzo at roughly $5.2 billion, an increase on the $5 billion valuation it attained in March when it raised $430 million. The total $610 million round marks the single-biggest funding round for a European fintech in the past year, according to Dealroom data.

TS Anil, CEO and co-founder of Monzo, told CNBC his firm plans to use the cash to build new products and accelerate its international expansion plans.

“At the heart of it we are a mission-oriented company that’s looking to build the single place where people can meet all of their financial needs,” Anil told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

“What’s exciting to me is that, as we pursue that mission of changing people’s relationship with money, we’ve built a business model that is congruent with that as well, with this model that is built entirely around the customer.”

Monzo entered the black for the first time last year, reporting two consecutive months of profitability at the end of its 2023 fiscal year. Anil said Monzo’s looking to ramp up profits with diversification into other income generators, like lending and savings.

Notably, Anil said that Monzo’s planning to launch its first pensions product in the next six to nine months.

That would put it in competition with traditional lenders including Barclays and NatWest. Last year, NatWest acquired 85% of U.K. workplace pension services provider Cushon for £144 million ($180 million).

Last year saw Monzo make its first foray into investments with a feature allowing customers to invest in funds managed by BlackRock.

Anil said Monzo identified that about a third of people using the service had never invested previously — and, more notably, 45% of the women investing via the Monzo app are first-time investors.

Another big priority for Monzo in the coming months is international expansion.

The company recently restarted its U.S. expansion efforts, hiring a long-time executive from Block’s Cash App as its new U.S. CEO after earlier abandoning a bid to acquire a banking license from U.S. regulators.

For now, Anil says, Monzo’s team in the U.S. is primarily focusing on product to ensure that the service it has there is of high enough quality that it can compete with major incumbents like JPMorgan and Citibank.

The U.S. has proven notoriously difficult for European neobanks to crack.

Berlin-based digital bank N26 notably withdrew from the U.S. in 2021.

Revolut, meanwhile, has failed to formally file an application for a U.S. bank charter yet despite having earlier said it intends to file a draft application for a U.S. bank license.

“What I like about how we’re approaching this is, at the heart of it, it’s not just words,” Anil told CNBC in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

“The necessary conditions for the U.S. for us is getting the product right. That’s what we’re spending our time and effort on there.”

European expansion is also on the cards, Anil said, although he didn’t commit to a date for when this will happen.

Big technology companies are consuming as much data as possible to become winners in artificial intelligence — but that’s not necessarily what will define winners, according to the boss of software giant Appian.

Matt Calkins, CEO and co-founder of Appian, said that though internet giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are spending billions on the tech, ensuring success in AI is “not just about money.”

“AI is not a place where money makes more money,” Calkins told CNBC in an interview at its London bureau on Tuesday.

Calkins was referring to the high-profile deals companies like Microsoft and Amazon are agreeing with ambitious and fast-growing foundational AI model makers, like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, a deal that entails Microsoft getting a stake in OpenAI and the latter adding its GPT language models to the Redmond, Washington-based technology giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft has struck a similar deal with Mistral, taking a 15 million euro ($16 million) stake in the French AI firm.

In OpenAI’s case, Microsoft has a non-voting observer sitting on the firm’s board.

That happened after a shocking series of events last year that saw the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, temporarily ousted, before later returning after hundreds of OpenAI employees threatened a coup to join Altman at Microsoft.

Separately, Amazon has invested a whopping $4 billion into U.S. AI firm Anthropic, which is behind the Claude AI system. Amazon holds a minority stake in Anthropic but no board seat.

Google, too, has committed billions of funding to Anthropic, agreeing last year to invest up to $2 billion.

British regulators are assessing whether deals agreed by Microsoft and Amazon with foundation AI model startups may constitute effective mergers that could lead to a substantial reduction of competition.

Microsoft denies its deal with OpenAI and Mistral and hiring from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon says its partnership with Anthropic constitutes a limited corporate investment, not a merger.

For Calkins, whether or not those deals qualify as mergers that threaten competition in AI, there will be room for innovators to thrive.

“If coalitions won the AI race, Google would have won by now,” he said, calling out the U.S. tech giant’s $500 million takeover of British AI lab DeepMind.

Far from it, Calkins argues — instead, he thinks Google lost out to Microsoft early on when it comes to generative AI, which threatens to upend the fabric of Google’s search business.

It follows a blunder that saw Google’s Gemini text-to-image generator produce inaccuracies in historical pictures that went viral online. Google paused image generation of people to refine the tool. CEO Sundar Pichai called the debacle “unacceptable,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC in February.

Google was not immediately available for comment and contacted by CNBC.

“This is a market for the clever,” Calkins said. “The fact that you’ve got enough money to buy, or buy a piece of, Anthropic or Mistral or any of that, that’s impressive. But AI may not be a ‘winner take all’ market.”

“There’s going to be different AI algorithms for different purposes, and they are going to be much more or less valuable, depending on whether and how you’ve loaded your own data into it,” he added.

Calkins said that the only way for AI systems to become truly clever and useful is by being capable of understanding what we want from them for use in our everyday lives.

“The best AI will be the AI you put your data into, not whoever bought the biggest stack,” he said.

The European Union officially approved its AI Act, the first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence, in March.

Calkins said businesses need clarity on how they can use AI safely and guarantee things like protection of intellectual property and users’ personal privacy

“In Europe there’s a natural skepticism … over here, we have regulations that push back against American Big Tech firms,” Calkins said.

“I would suggest it’s time for that again, with fair use of copyrighted information. We need a clear playing field, we need to understand what data we’re allowed to use.”

The U.S. has revoked certain licenses for chip exports to Chinese tech giant Huawei, the Commerce Department told CNBC on Tuesday, in its latest efforts to curb China’s tech power.

“We continuously assess how our controls can best protect our national security and foreign policy interests, taking into consideration a constantly changing threat environment and technological landscape,” a Commerce spokesperson said in a statement.

“As part of this process, as we have done in the past, we sometimes revoke export licenses,”  the spokesperson said, declining to comment on specific licenses. “But we can confirm that we have revoked certain licenses for exports to Huawei.”

Huawei was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019, which banned U.S. firms from selling technology – including 5G chips – to the Chinese tech giant over national security concerns. In 2020, the U.S. tightened chip restrictions on Huawei, requiring foreign manufacturers using American chipmaking equipment to obtain a license before they can sell semiconductors to Huawei.

Huawei’s consumer business, which includes smartphones and laptops, is seeing a resurgence after launching the Mate 60 Pro smartphone in August.

A TechInsights analysis of Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro smartphone revealed an advanced chip made by China’s top chip maker, SMIC. The smartphone is also said to be equipped with 5G connectivity – a feature which U.S. sanctions had sought to block.

U.S. chip firms Qualcomm and Intel are two of the companies that supply chips to Huawei. Qualcomm in an SEC filing earlier this month said it expects operations to be “further impacted” from its customers, such as Huawei, developing their own chips.

“While we have continued to sell integrated circuit products to Huawei under our licenses, we do not expect to receive product revenues from Huawei beyond the current calendar year,” Qualcomm said.

“Additionally, to the extent that Huawei’s 5G devices take share from Chinese original equipment manufacturers that utilize our 5G products or from non-Chinese OEMs that utilize our 5G products in devices they sell into China, our revenues, results of operations and cash flows could be further impacted,” Qualcomm said.

Last month, Huawei launched a fresh lineup of phones – the Pura 70 series – in a bid to challenge Apple in China.

Apple is facing pressure from Huawei in China as iPhone sales plunged 19.1% in the first quarter while Huawei’s smartphone sales soared 69.7%, according to Counterpoint Research.

Huawei’s net profit in 2023 grew by 144.5% from a year ago to 87 billion yuan (about $12 billion) partially helped by the sales of Mate 60 Pro in China, the firm revealed in March.