Britain has cemented its position as Europe’s undisputed home for high-growth business, with a record 80 “unicorn” companies now valued at more than $1 billion apiece.

The country’s strength in building promising financial technology and artificial intelligence firms has helped it record the third-highest number of unicorns anywhere in the world. Only the United States and China are home to more private companies worth in excess of $1 billion, according to a new global ranking.

The UK now boasts a record 80 unicorns worth a combined £242.4 billion, overtaking India to take third place in the annual index produced by the Hurun Research Institute, the Shanghai-based firm behind the closely watched Global Unicorn Index.

With 23 new unicorns minted over the past 12 months, the research concluded that Britain had reinforced its “position as Europe’s undisputed start-up capital”, noting that it now has more unicorns than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden combined.

The nation’s unicorn count has nearly doubled since 2016, and the “pipeline of new companies entering the billion-dollar club is the strongest it has ever been”, Hurun said. In total, the firm tracked 1,603 unicorns across 52 countries, with the combined value of the world’s unicorns rising 43 per cent to $8 trillion.

The number of unicorns a country produces is watched closely as a barometer of the health of an economy, its appetite for innovation and its ability to create companies with the potential to scale globally.

Britain’s continued strength comes against a backdrop of concern about the appeal of the London Stock Exchange as a home for the most promising businesses, as well as government efforts to nurture emerging domestic technology firms amid questions over the wisdom of relying on a handful of American giants for essential technology.

Ministers have already stepped in to keep home-grown talent listed in the UK, part of a wider push to strengthen the appeal of the London Stock Exchange after a run of de-listings and companies shifting their primary listings overseas. That includes fresh government backing for AI firms weighing a domestic float.

Revolut, the financial services group, remains the UK’s most valuable unicorn with a £57.8 billion valuation, having recently leapfrogged Barclays in value after an Nvidia-backed deal. It is followed by Nscale, the artificial intelligence data centre business, worth £11.6 billion at its last funding round, Hurun said.

Fintech companies account for a third of the UK’s unicorns and more than half of their total value. It is a sector in which fresh names keep emerging, from data platforms to challenger lenders, with recent arrivals such as 9fin reaching unicorn status with British Business Bank support.

Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, was the fastest-growing sector for UK unicorns, with nine such companies worth a combined £40.6 billion, quadrupling in value in a single year. Just ten of the UK’s 80 unicorns are developing physical products, with the rest building software or services.

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher at Hurun Research Institute, said the UK had shown it was “the best gateway into European tech” for international investors.

Hurun’s broader global report identified a record 1,603 unicorns worldwide, with six of the world’s ten most valuable examples working on AI, an industry that also dominated the list of private companies posting the largest valuation increases.

“The concentration of economic power in a small number of AI companies is unprecedented,” the report said.

The enormous valuations attached to leading AI businesses have prompted concern about a bubble in public markets, and there are signs the boom is reshaping the venture market too. Analysts say the capital-raising environment has tilted towards founders working in AI, while remaining challenging for many entrepreneurs in other sectors.

AI is accounting for an unprecedented share of total deal value in European venture capital, and “non-traditional investors” such as corporations and hedge funds are joining funding rounds at record levels.

Other sectors producing UK unicorns include energy, with four such businesses, among them Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest energy supplier, and its spin-off Kraken Technologies, as well as life sciences, which accounts for eight unicorns.

Hurun’s analysis of the 136 founders behind the UK’s largest private technology companies underlined the industry’s continuing lack of diversity. More than one in four attended Oxford or Cambridge. Only eight are women, prompting Hurun to warn that “the UK is failing to capture the full potential of its female entrepreneurial talent.” More encouragingly, more than half of all the founders were born outside the UK.

The UK’s unicorns have an average valuation of £3.2 billion, Hurun said, and took an average of 3.6 years to reach the $1 billion mark.

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U.S. stocks ​finished slightly lower on Wednesday with falling technology shares, but gains in Meta Platforms provided some support along with comments from Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh that inflation risks had eased recently. Warsh also said he will stick firmly to the U.S. central ‌bank’s 2% inflation ⁠target and “disappoint” ⁠anyone who expects loose monetary policy despite President Donald Trump’s call for interest rate cuts.

Oil prices rose sharply at the start of ​the Iran war. Traders slightly pared their rate-hike expectations as Warsh spoke, but they still expect at least one hike ​from the U.S. central bank this year, according to data compiled by LSEG. Shares of Meta Platforms rallied after Bloomberg News reported that it is building a cloud business to sell excess AI computing capacity.

“This does ​seem to be something that is likely to continue to help the ⁠stock,” said ‌Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder in New York. “It has underperformed the ​Mag 7 group” ​of other megacap stocks. Meta shares remain down for the year to date.

An ⁠index of semiconductors was off sharply.

Investors are keeping a close eye ​on talks between the U.S. and Iran and they remain cautious, especially ​with a long U.S. holiday weekend coming up, Ghriskey said.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 14.34 points, or 0.19%, to end at 7,485.02 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 169.56 points, or 0.65%, to 26,044.16. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 3.62 points, or 0.01%, to 52,315.58.
The key monthly U.S. jobs report is due out on Thursday, while the market will be closed Friday ahead of the Fourth ‌of July holiday. U.S. Vice President JD Vance said discussions between the U.S. and Iran were going well as they held indirect technical talks in Qatar about the Strait of ​Hormuz on Wednesday, ​adding Washington would not return to ⁠full combat unless necessary. The U.S. and Iran signed an interim accord last month. Investors are also digesting data from the Institute for Supply Management that showed U.S. manufacturing activity had slowed in June but was ​still solid.The day’s lackluster performance comes after a strong second quarter for the indexes. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite registered their biggest quarterly gains since 2020, while the Dow marked its best showing since 2022.

Among the day’s decliners, shares of Alcoa fell after Australia’s South32 agreed to sell most of its aluminium assets to Alcoa.

BSE Index Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of BSE, on Wednesday launched the BSE REITs and Commercial Real Estate Index, a new benchmark designed to track the performance of listed real estate investment trusts (REITs) and companies with significant exposure to commercial real estate.

The index includes companies belonging to the REIT category as well as firms classified under the residential and commercial projects segment that derive meaningful exposure from commercial real estate assets and rental income.

The BSE REITs and Commercial Real Estate Index has a base value of 1,000, with September 2022 as the first value date. It will be reconstituted semi-annually in March and September.

Announcing the launch, Ashutosh Singh, MD & CEO of BSE Index Services, said the index is the first in the industry to provide focused exposure to India’s yield-generating real estate ecosystem, including office, retail and leasing-led business models.

He said the index combines listed REITs with companies having significant commercial real estate assets and rental income streams. It also incorporates a 20% cap on individual constituents to ensure diversification, making it suitable for creating investable products and targeted investment strategies.

According to BSE, the index can serve as the underlying benchmark for exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and index funds, while also being used for benchmarking portfolio management services (PMS), mutual fund schemes and institutional portfolios.
Also read: Only 1/5th the size of NSE? Why Jefferies predicts 27% upside for this near-monopoly stockThe launch expands BSE’s suite of thematic indices and comes amid growing investor interest in income-generating commercial real estate assets through listed REITs and related companies.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

The Halifax brand is being scrapped after 173 years, with all customer accounts to be rebranded to Lloyds.

Lloyds Banking Group, which has owned Halifax since 2009, confirmed the move after reports in May said it was considering phasing out Halifax as a standalone brand.

Lloyds said it remained committed to the town of Halifax and the wider Yorkshire and Humber region, where 3,000 staff are based at its Trinity Road office.

Halifax Labour MP Kate Dearden described the move as “bitterly disappointing” and said she had been in discussions with Lloyds to “ensure their commitment and continued investment in Halifax long into the future”.

Lloyds Banking Group’s chief executive of consumer relationships Jas Singh said very little would change for customers.

“As Halifax changes to Lloyds, our Halifax customers will keep everything they know and love today – the same fantastic app design, the same friendly faces in our branches – even the same sort code and account number,” he said.

No job cuts are being announced as part of the shake-up, and Halifax branches will either be rebranded to Lloyds or shifted to a nearby branch throughout 2027.

It is understood the decision was rooted in efforts to simplify the group’s portfolio, with the distinction between Halifax and Lloyds seen as becoming less prominent in recent years.

India Ratings & Research has downgraded the non-convertible debentures (NCDs) of Jana Capital and its wholly-owned subsidiary Jana Holdings to default rating following extension of the repayment schedule by six months to the end of December this year.

Jana Holdings Ltd (JHL) owns about 17% in Jana Small Finance Bank, which is publicly listed. The bank’s share price opened sharply lower Wednesday at Rs 445 against the previous close of Rs 469 but recovered immediately and closed barely changed at Rs 468.80.

The rating company said that JHL and Jana Capital Ltd (JCL) have repayments of around Rs 4200 crore in total due on June 30 as principal plus accrued interest.

“While the entities had previously met debt repayments through refinancing, they were unable to do so on this occasion. Consequently, the tenure extension has been undertaken to avoid a potential default on the original due date, and has therefore been treated as a distressed debt exchange and a default by Ind-Ra,” the rating company said Wednesday.
Jana Capital is a core investment company, which promoted Jana Holdings as the non-operative holding company to hold the promoter stake in the small finance bank.

Both JCL and JHL are non-operating entities with no cash-flows of their own, and were to make payments towards the NCDs either by a stake sale of their operating banking entity or through refinancing.

Strategy Inc., the bitcoin treasury company formerly known as MicroStrategy, climbed sharply Wednesday as investors responded to a sweeping overhaul of the company’s capital strategy that includes a program to sell bitcoin for the first time since 2022, a $1 billion repurchase authorization for its digital credit securities and a new framework designed to address mounting pressure on the company’s preferred stock financing model.

Shares of the Tysons Corner, Virginia-based company were trading at $93.73 as of 10:08 a.m. EDT, up $6.80, or 7.82%, on the day. The advance builds on a 4.67% jump Monday after the company announced the new corporate plan and represents a meaningful recovery from what has been one of the most difficult stretches in the company’s modern history, with the stock having fallen from a peak of $543 in late 2024 to a recent low near $85, a decline of roughly 83% from that all-time high.

Strategy’s board authorized a BTC Monetization Program under which the company may sell bitcoin from time to time for three primary purposes: to fund a U.S. dollar reserve, support share repurchases and bolster liquidity. The company also announced it has established a repurchase program for up to $1 billion aggregate purchase price of its outstanding Digital Credit Securities, including its preferred stock series.

Strategy adopted a Digital Credit Capital Framework designed to strengthen the company’s various series of preferred securities, enhance liquidity, preserve long-term Bitcoin exposure, and address the structural pressures that have mounted on its preferred stock financing model throughout 2026.

The moves represent a pivotal shift for a company that built its entire identity around an unwavering, one-directional accumulation of bitcoin. Co-founder Michael Saylor had spent years publicly refusing to entertain any scenario in which the company would sell any portion of its holdings, a position that became both a brand and a conviction central to the company’s appeal among retail investors and bitcoin enthusiasts. The decision to authorize bitcoin sales, even for limited and specific purposes, was initially received with a measure of disbelief among the company’s most devoted followers.

Strategy is “evolving from one-way capital” deployment, the company said in its announcement of the new framework. The company’s filings confirm it made no bitcoin purchases between June 22 and June 28, the first week without an acquisition in some time, as management prepared the new capital framework.

As of June 28, Strategy holds 847,363 bitcoin acquired for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $64.10 billion, making it the world’s largest corporate holder of the cryptocurrency by a considerable margin. At current bitcoin prices near $58,900, those holdings carry a market value of roughly $50 billion, representing an unrealized loss against the aggregate cost basis. The gap between purchase price and current market value has been a central driver of the company’s financial stress, as mark-to-market accounting rules require Strategy to record non-cash gains or losses on its bitcoin holdings each quarter, producing massive headline losses even when the company’s underlying software operations continue to generate revenue.

The preferred stock funding mechanism that had underpinned Strategy’s bitcoin accumulation strategy faces particular strain. Annual preferred dividend obligations have grown to roughly $1.2 billion, a fourfold increase since the start of 2026, while cash reserves have fallen 38% over the same period. Strategy held the STRC dividend rate at 11.50% for four consecutive months despite the stock’s sharp discount to par, disappointing investors who had anticipated a meaningful increase to at least 12% to 12.50% to reflect the effective market yield of approximately 15%.

Adding to the structural pressure, Strategy was removed from several major Russell Growth indices, including the Russell 1000, 3000 and Top 200 Growth benchmarks, effective June 29, reducing automatic demand from passive and index-tracking institutional investors. Insider selling of approximately $25.9 million worth of shares over the past three months has compounded the negative sentiment, alongside a broader episode of historically large bitcoin ETF outflows during June that CoinShares described as the worst week of redemptions the bitcoin ETF category had seen since the products launched, reflecting a significant wave of institutional profit-taking from bitcoin-linked assets broadly.

Despite the pressure, Wall Street’s major analyst voices have maintained generally constructive ratings on the stock. TD Cowen lowered its price target on Strategy to $260 from $400 and kept a Buy rating on the shares, calling the company’s Digital Credit Framework a “digital credit engine” and characterizing the bitcoin monetization program as a rounding error in the context of Strategy’s overall bitcoin holdings. Citi has similarly maintained a Buy rating with a $260 price target following the capital plan announcement. One analyst at a research firm covering the company estimated the stock could surge as much as 500% from recent levels to roughly $570 under a scenario in which bitcoin recovers and the new capital framework successfully stabilizes the preferred stock financing model.

Bitcoin itself was showing signs of recovery Wednesday, hovering near $58,900 after briefly testing $58,000 the previous week, a price level that had drawn what some market observers described as genuine buyer interest. Strategy’s fortunes remain inextricably linked to bitcoin’s direction, with each significant move in the cryptocurrency translating almost immediately into corresponding gains or losses in the company’s equity value. The stock’s beta of approximately 3.05 means it tends to move roughly three times as much as the broader market in either direction, a characteristic that has amplified both the extraordinary gains investors experienced between 2023 and late 2024 and the steep losses that followed.

Strategy’s next earnings report is scheduled for August 4, an event investors will watch closely for further detail on how the bitcoin monetization program is being implemented, how much of the $1 billion repurchase authorization has been deployed and whether the company’s preferred dividend obligations can be managed sustainably as the company navigates what its own leadership has acknowledged is a fundamentally different capital management environment from the one that drove its initial rise to prominence as the world’s most prominent corporate bitcoin holder.

Getty Images has abandoned its planned $3.7 billion merger with Shutterstock, walking away rather than accept a condition imposed by Britain’s competition regulator that would have forced the sale of part of the enlarged business.

The two image-licensing heavyweights first agreed to combine in January 2025, betting that scale would help them weather the disruption sweeping through the stock imagery market as generative artificial intelligence tools began producing pictures on demand. Eighteen months on, that logic has run into the buffers of British merger control.

In May, the Competition and Markets Authority cleared the tie-up, but only on the condition that the merged group offload Shutterstock’s editorial business. The watchdog’s independent inquiry group had concluded that keeping the two editorial operations under one roof would thin out the choices available to UK media outlets and could, in time, push up prices, with Shutterstock ranking among the “few meaningful” rivals to Getty in the space. The regulator set out its reasoning and the divestiture remedy in full when it published its findings.

Editorial content, the corner of the market at the heart of the CMA’s concerns, covers photographs and video of newsworthy events, public figures and landmarks. British customers, the regulator noted, typically need both global and domestic imagery spanning sport, breaking news and celebrity coverage, a dependency that trade press had flagged as a competition pressure point well before the final ruling.

Getty and Shutterstock had themselves floated a sale of Shutterstock’s global editorial arm at the close of the CMA’s phase 1 review, describing it at the time as “peripheral to Shutterstock’s core operations”. That offer, however, was not enough to see the deal through without a formal, supervised divestment, and it is precisely that supervised sale the Getty board has now declined to pursue.

In a regulatory filing, the Getty board said it had unanimously resolved not to proceed with the disposal of Shutterstock’s editorial business under CMA supervision, and to terminate the merger agreement outright. The deal will formally lapse after the extended deadline of 6 July. Shutterstock did not respond to a request for comment.

Investors delivered a swift and uneven verdict. Getty shares slipped 4 per cent in pre-market trading, while New York-listed Shutterstock tumbled 26 per cent, a gap that underlines how much more the smaller company had riding on the combination.

The collapse lands at a curious moment for Getty, which has spent recent months recasting its relationship with the AI industry it once regarded purely as a threat. Only days before pulling the plug on Shutterstock, the company signed a multi-year licensing agreement with OpenAI that will see images from its library surface within ChatGPT’s search display, folding richer visual results into the chatbot. The arrangement stops short of allowing OpenAI to train its own image generator, Dall-E, on the archive, and no financial terms were disclosed.

That commercial thaw sits alongside a bruising legal setback. Getty recently lost a closely watched copyright infringement claim against a rival AI developer, a case the industry had cast as an existential test for generative technology. Taken together, the licensing deal and the courtroom defeat capture the bind facing content owners: monetise the technology through partnership, or fight it through litigation, with mixed results on both fronts.

The prize now foregone was considerable. Getty had argued the Shutterstock merger could unlock cost savings of between $150 million and $200 million within three years of completion, and create a business with combined revenue of roughly $2 billion, the bulk of it recurring subscription income. For a sector still working out how to price and protect its assets in the age of AI-generated imagery, the failure to consolidate leaves both companies to face that reckoning alone.

Small firms are bracing for a squeezed Christmas after Royal Mail moved to cap the volume of mail it will collect from business premises during the festive rush, a limit that traders warn could choke off growth at the most lucrative moment of their year.

Under a change to its terms, the carrier told business customers that daily collection capacity across November and December “will be limited to a maximum of 3 times the usual collection capacity used”. In plain terms, “collection capacity” is the physical volume of post, counted in sacks, cages or parcels, that Royal Mail contractually agrees to pick up from a company’s premises during its scheduled daily slot.

The cap sits on top of any volume limits already written into a firm’s contract, and it lands hardest on seasonal businesses, the ones that survive by scaling up sharply for the Christmas holidays rather than shipping at a steady clip all year round.

For many owners, the timing could hardly be worse. As readers will know from our recent coverage of whether your small business is ready for Christmas, the golden quarter is when a year’s fortunes are often decided.

“Christmas is make or break for many small firms,” said Tina McKenzie, policy chair of the Federation of Small Businesses. “It’s the biggest trading period of the year, with orders piling up as shoppers buy gifts and businesses work flat out to keep up with demand.

“At a time like this, the last thing firms need is to be told there’s a cap on collections. Many rely on Royal Mail picking up parcels from their premises because stepping away to queue at a post office simply isn’t practical when every minute counts.”

McKenzie added that the uncertainty over the limit “piles unnecessary pressure on small businesses at the worst possible moment. They need confidence that the postal service will support them through their busiest season.”

Royal Mail defended the move as routine forward planning. “The Christmas period is our busiest time of year, where volumes double,” a spokesman said. “As part of our routine peak planning, we agree appropriate daily collection volumes with our business customers. This helps us plan effectively and provide a reliable service. Very few customers require more than three times our usual collection capacity and in such cases we’ll discuss with them individually.”

The collection limit arrives just as the bill for distribution is rising. In May, Royal Mail lifted its fuel and energy surcharge from 11 per cent to 16 per cent for domestic services, and from 8 per cent to 13 per cent for its Parcelforce Worldwide operation. The carrier blamed “rising cost pressures outside of our control, including the ongoing situation in the Middle East and the resulting impact on global oil and fuel prices.”

It forms part of a broader tightening for firms that lean on the network. Royal Mail is separately lobbying to scrap a cap that limits how much it can raise second-class stamp prices each year, a regulatory safeguard in place since privatisation more than a decade ago that ties second-class rises to the consumer prices index. No such protection covers first-class post, and the gap has widened accordingly: the protected second-class stamp has climbed from 50p at privatisation to 91p today, while a first-class stamp has surged from 60p to £1.80 over the same stretch. It is not the first time the carrier’s charging has drawn scrutiny from smaller customers, as our reporting on anti-fraud technology found to be mischarging thousands of small firms has shown.

The changes fall under a wider operational overhaul led by Daniel Kretinsky, whose takeover of parent company International Distribution Services completed in 2022. Kretinsky, who also holds a sizeable stake in Sainsbury’s, is trying to steady a business that keeps missing its key performance targets. Last year, Ofcom fined Royal Mail £21 million after its delivery performance fell “well short” of first and second-class targets, with the regulator concluding that “people aren’t getting what they pay for when they buy a stamp”. It was the third such penalty in recent years, following a £5.6 million fine in 2023 and a £10.5 million fine in 2024.

In response, Royal Mail has pledged to invest £500 million over the next five years to lift on-time delivery rates, a turnaround plan we examined in detail when the carrier set out its £500m investment and part-time workforce overhaul. The programme includes cuts to second-class deliveries on Saturdays, which began in May, and a move to shift roughly 6,000 part-time postal workers into full-time roles to shore up the network.

For Gordon Leatherdale, the cap is not an abstraction but a threat to a year’s careful planning. The 51-year-old is the founder of Natural & Noble, a Wiltshire-based business selling DIY drinks kits that launched in 2018. The company depends on the national postal service for all its direct-to-consumer sales, which account for 30 per cent of annual revenue of about £750,000.

Leatherdale appeared on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den in March to pitch the business and has enjoyed a sizeable sales boost since. “Therefore we decided to invest a lot in direct-to-consumer marketing this year,” he said. “We’re very Christmas-focused,” he added, framing the change as Royal Mail “putting a cap on our ability to grow and to fulfil orders”.

The brand’s kits let people create their own spirits at home, from gin, rum, vodka and whisky infusion sets to cocktail kits, and they are pitched squarely at gift-buyers, which makes the timing of the restriction especially awkward.

“For us at this time of the year, we might only send out 20 or 30 orders a day,” he said. “But at Christmas time, particularly mid-November to mid-December, we’re sending out 15 to 20 times that amount, as opposed to the [new] Royal Mail cap of three times.”

Two neighbouring businesses at Broad Lane Farm, a business park near Devizes, were equally “baffled” by the change, Leatherdale said. “We rely on Royal Mail to pretty much take everything we can sell. It is that infrastructure partner that you can historically rely on, unless they’re striking, to send your orders.”

He knows the cost of disruption first-hand. During the 2022 postal strikes, by his own calculations, Natural & Noble lost about £45,000 worth of orders, a wound the business “endured” and does not want to reopen.

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