The majority of companies raising equity for the first time are now based outside London, according to research from Beauhurst Insights and the law firm Penningtons Manches Cooper, with the capital’s share of first-time deals falling to 44.6 per cent in the first half of 2026.

London’s share of all first-time equity deals had already dropped to 49.1 per cent in 2025, the researchers said. The last time more first-time fundraisings were completed outside the capital than inside it was in 2022, according to Beauhurst.

Companies using artificial intelligence captured 58.6 per cent of the value of all first-time deals in the six months to June, the study found. That compares with 32.9 per cent in 2025 and 17 per cent in 2024.

The 2,730 start-ups that sold shares for the first time in 2025 raised a total of £4.4bn, an increase of 11.7 per cent, according to the report.

However, 30 per cent more companies secured external capital for the first time, and the researchers said investors had committed less money per company and at lower valuations. Pre-investment valuations fell by 20.3 per cent to £1.5m last year, and the average has since slipped to £1.45m.

The average deal size fell from £2m to £1.7m. The median deal stood at £290,000, a gap the researchers attributed to the effect of several very large first-time fundraisings.

Henry Whorwood, managing director at Beauhurst Insights, said the increased volume of first-time equity raises reversed a long-term decline. He attributed that decline to venture capital firms increasingly needing to support their existing portfolio companies with more capital.

Mr Whorwood said the rise of AI had driven the reversal, with a wave of companies seeking to exploit the technology.

London leads on AI rounds

Although the capital’s overall share has fallen, London completed more AI first rounds than the rest of the UK combined, at 392 against 268, the research found.

London’s 60 per cent share of AI fundraising rounds was 11 percentage points ahead of its share of the market as a whole. The researchers said this reflected the concentration of investors and support services for technology companies in the capital.

Separate Barclays and Beauhurst figures published in July showed that UK equity investment rose to £14.4bn in the first half of 2026, with London accounting for the bulk of the money raised.

Outside London, first-time fundraising in the West Midlands nearly doubled in 2025, according to the report. Northern Ireland recorded a rise of 73 per cent and Scotland 60 per cent. London-based deal volumes rose by 27 per cent.

Largest first-time rounds

The report pointed to several very large first-time fundraisings. Isomorphic Labs, the London-based, Google-backed start-up that uses AI for drug discovery, raised £464m in March 2025.

Edinburgh-based Fidra Energy, which has developed a battery energy storage system, secured £445m from its owner, the US institutional investor EIG, alongside the UK’s National Wealth Fund.

In the first half of this year, the £814m of first-time equity raised by Ineffable Intelligence represented 39 per cent of the value of all first-time deals, according to the research.

The London-headquartered AI company was founded in late 2025 by David Silver, a computer science professor at University College London and a former senior AI specialist at Google’s DeepMind labs in London. The British Business Bank was among the backers of the Ineffable Intelligence round.

Separate Tracxn data published in July found that investors were writing fewer, larger cheques in the first half across UK tech.

About the author

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

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SEOUL — YouTube’s tighter advertising rules on eating-disorder and binge-eating videos have cut ad money for some Korean mukbang and diet creators and pushed others to delete large parts of their archives.

Mukbang — eating broadcasts that often show very large meals — grew from Korean live streams into a global format. The latest enforcement wave treats some of that footage, and some diet vlogs, as content that vulnerable viewers might copy.

Tzuyang, a mukbang host with more than 10 million subscribers, recorded a line that Korean outlets treated as a weather vane. Filming at Sinpo International Market in Incheon, she said, “Eating a lot is apparently no longer the trend these days.” She added, “From now on, I’ll be a YouTuber who eats in moderation.” The Korea Times rendered a close version: “I heard eating a lot isn’t the trend these days” and “I’ll try to be a YouTuber who eats a reasonable amount from now on.” Herald Business noted she then continued a familiar large-portion video.

Smaller channels took direct hits. Salbbaejo, also styled Salppaejo or Salbaejo in English reports, a creator with about 440,000 subscribers, posted that monetization was suspended. “I don’t know which videos will be flagged, so I’ve also stopped uploading,” the creator said, according to Herald Business. The same post said YouTube had tightened binge-eating and eating-disorder rules and was applying them to channels with related uploads.

Diet creator Miso, with about 100,000 subscribers, received a guideline-violation notice and chose to delete 339 of 667 videos — more than half the channel — while appealing, Herald Business and SBS reported. Miso told Korea Times that older clips included specific weight figures and weight-loss routines that could be risky for some viewers to copy.

YouTube’s published advertiser-friendly updates state that content which “focuses on eating disorders and shares triggers like guides around binging, hiding, or hoarding food or abusing laxatives will not receive ad revenue.” The company said educational or documentary videos, and survivor accounts that mention those behaviors without promoting them, “won’t be impacted by this change.” Community guidelines have long barred content that promotes or instructs eating disorders; recovery and educational context can stay up with age gates or resource panels.

SBS summarized the platform’s position as not a blanket ban on educational, documentary or ordinary meal videos. Enforcement so far, that report said, has landed mainly on diet-experience and extreme weight-loss channels; it was not confirmed that large-portion stars such as Tzuyang had been sanctioned.

Titles, thumbnails, descriptions and tags are part of the review, Korea Times reported. A video that looks like a restaurant tour in the frame can still fail if the packaging sells a binge.

That distinction is why the industry is nervous. Tzuyang is known for feats such as 121 plates of conveyor-belt sushi. Hibab, or Heebab, holds a Korea Record Institute mark for 10 bowls of jjajangmyeon in 25 minutes. Neither was listed in the Korean coverage as formally demonetized this week. Their catalogs sit close to the line YouTube now draws between a lot of food on camera and “imitable” binge behavior.

YouTube’s eating-disorder work is not new. A 2023 blog post said the company would prohibit content featuring imitable disordered behaviors, including severe calorie restriction and purging, after talks with groups such as the National Eating Disorders Association. Ads and community rules were later aligned so that trigger-style how-tos would not earn money. U.K. researchers at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate said in July 2026 that recommendations to a simulated 13-year-old still included harmful diet videos, though at a lower rate than in 2024. A YouTube spokeswoman told the BBC then: “The wellbeing of our viewers is our top priority.”

For Korean creators, the immediate problem is cash flow. Demonetization stops ads on a whole channel or on flagged videos. Deleting hundreds of clips erases years of search traffic. Halting uploads, as Salbbaejo did, freezes the habit that algorithms reward.

Mukbang was never only comedy. Viewers use it as companionship, as food porn, as a substitute meal. Public-health researchers have argued that watching extreme intake can normalize binge patterns. Creators argue they are performing, not prescribing. YouTube’s text sides with imitation risk when the video looks like a method.

What remains allowed, on the company’s own pages, is a meal that is just a meal, a documentary that does not teach restriction, a recovery story that does not offer a how-to. What is being squeezed is the hybrid that made Korean food YouTube travel: a smiling host, a table that should feed six, a title that boasts the count.

Tzuyang’s “moderation” line does not rewrite the catalog. It does mark the moment the biggest name in the genre said the trend had moved. Salbbaejo’s community post and Miso’s 339 deletions show what the policy looks like when a channel is already in the penalty box. YouTube has not issued a Korea-specific ban on mukbang. It has said binge guides and hoarding-as-content will not be paid. The creators now have to decide whether their next upload is a dinner or a dare.

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This transcript was generated by AI. It is not curated or reviewed and is provided for convenience and information purposes only. The accuracy and completeness of the transcript are not guaranteed.

Nicole Benjamin: Hey, everybody. It’s Nicole Benjamin, your host here at Seeking Alpha, to bring to you another episode of The Weekly Grade. And joining us for today is none other than VP of Quantitative Strategy here at Seeking Alpha, Steven Cress himself, the wonderful guy behind a lot of the amazing products you see on site, our Alpha Picks portfolio, our Pro Quant portfolio, and our newest Quant Growth and Income portfolio. So follow him back on Seeking Alpha. Make sure you check out his articles, see if there’s anything that might be in there for you. And Steve, thank you so much for joining us today.

Steven Cress: Hey, thank you very much for organizing it.

NB: Absolutely. Now, I wanna jump right in. Today, we are talking about Pagaya Technologies and an AI-powered fintech holding. It’s considered a quant strong buy on the site, and this is despite experiencing significant pullback from its recent peak. So how does Pagaya’s network model convert loan volume and institutional power growth into operational leverage without requiring this aggressive marketing spend?

SC: Well, they’re doing a great job on it. As you can see by our factor grades, on the right-hand side, they are a very profitable company, so they’re managing to do it. And actually, you can see that profitability grades increased to B plus from a B six months ago, so the trend is going in the right direction. So this means that their revenue and earnings are converting to profitability, so their leverage has been applied well, and they’re taking leverage off the table and turning that into profits. You can see analysts are very positive as well. When you look at these factor revision grades, it has improved to an A.

That means analysts are taking their estimates up from where they previously were and at a much faster pace. You could see actually six months ago compared to the sector, it had a D grade, which meant analysts’ revisions were lower than other companies for this sector. But their fortunes have turned around, profitability has improved, and analysts are actually taking their revisions upwards. So in the last ninety days, as a matter of fact, we have had eight analysts take up their earnings estimates and zero have taken it down. So that’s really positive.

And for the upcoming quarter, which is November sixth, you’ve also had eight analysts revise up their estimates and zero have revised it down. So lots of positives on that front. You could see looking at the quant rating history, we did have a strong buy, and then we got slightly negative on it for a while. That was probably when we saw the momentum grade drop to an F and the revisions grade drop to D. So I want to sell and stay to hold for quite a period of time. But a couple months ago, we went into the buy territory and the strong buy, and it’s obvious from the improvement in the factor grades why. So currently, the company is it’s in the IT sector. It’s a software company.

It ranks two out of one hundred and sixty-six companies that we cover in software, and their long-term EPS growth rate is tremendous. It’s at a six hundred percent difference in terms of its growth compared to this sector. ROE, as I said is improving as well. If you actually look at the ROE growth rate, it is a forty-three percent growth rate in their ROE versus the sector at seven percent. And from a valuation standpoint, the company looks really attractive as well. It has an A plus grade on value, and its multiple is dirt cheap. It’s currently at a multiple of five point five times versus the IT sector at a multiple of twenty-three times.

So it’s literally at a seventy-six percent discount. Now, what I, I like today and what you led with is there has actually been a pullback in the stock. It is well off its fifty-two-week high. The stock currently is eighteen dollars and seventy-three cents. The fifty-two-week high was thirty-eight dollars. But we’re inter– we’re entering sort of an interesting type of year. Typically, most people know September is seasonally weak. But what also happens is with stocks that are well off their fifty-two-week highs, many institutions try to clear their books out of their losers by the end of October. So sometimes weak stocks that are hovering around that fifty-two-week low, they’ll remain low.

Today, this company’s got a market cap of one point seven billion, so it’s a really small cap. There’s a seller out there despite the strong fundamentals, despite that analysts are taking their estimates up. Notably, there are other strong buys out of the stock. If you look at the consensus from Wall Street analysts, they have a strong buy on it, and the consensus of Seeking Alpha contributors is a strong buy, as well as the quant. So that’s sort of the trifecta. You have three independent research sources all indicating strong buy on the stock right now. So it looks very timely. I’d say take advantage and be opportunistic of the pullback.

Institutions, of course, as I mentioned, they tend to clear some of their losers out by the end of October. That’s when their calendar year ends. So could remain weak for a little bit longer, but you wanna take advantage of that.

NB: All right. Well, I wanna jump right over Steve and talk about some of the products we have here on site, our Pro Quant portfolio, our Alpha Picks portfolio, and our newest Quant Growth and Income portfolio. And in this side-by-side comparison, the Pro Quant portfolio, Alpha Picks, and QGI, how should investors be evaluating the trade frequency, asset universe, and the rebalancing cadences when deciding which of these quantitative strategies will be a great match for their investment objectives?

SC: I’m glad you brought it up. So all three of these products are designed to be really user-friendly. Individuals don’t always have a lot of time. To do the research on their own. Even though Seeking Alpha’s premium site will rank all the stocks, and you could see if they’re strong buy, buy, or sell, it’s still a lot of research. So these products help bring forward our top strong buys. But it does it at a different pace. Some people like to be really aggressive, some individuals don’t like to be aggressive. So the Pro Quant portfolio was designed for long-term capital appreciation, but for people who like a high frequency of ideas.

So the portfolio is always fixed at thirty stocks, but it rebalances weekly, which means, on average, every week you have two to three new ideas coming out. So for individuals that like that pace of ideas, the Pro Quant portfolio would be the product. For individuals who want long-term capital appreciation, but not quite that high frequency of having to get new ideas every week, Pro Alpha Picks spreads it out to only two ideas a month. So on the trading date closest to the first of the month and the fifteenth of the month, an individual or subscriber would receive those emails. So you only get two new ideas a month as opposed to two to three a week with the Pro Quant portfolio.

And then for the Quant Growth in Income, that’s actually focused on people that want a combination of capital appreciation and income generation. So the common thread with that fixed portfolio of thirty stocks is every single one of them pays a dividend. So it’s got a nice little yield, and many investors like to have that yield. We refer to that as more of the all-weather type of product. So it may not have quite the performance of a PQP or an Alpha Picks, but it’s more of a steady eddy. So three different portfolios for three different risk appetites.

NB: Right. Well, I also wanna bring up some stats here that we have about these portfolios. And just considering what’s on the screen, all of these portfolios are demonstrating significant total return over their respective market benchmarks. So in an environment where rate expectations and sector rotations create this short-term price volatility, how does sticking strictly to the factor grades prevent losses during these market pullbacks?

SC: Well, I wouldn’t say that factor grades prevent losses. Typically, when you hit periods that are really volatile, stocks with strong fundamentals actually do sell off quite a bit because when anxiety is high and sentiment is more fearful, people tend to take profits in stocks, and they’ll go to safe haven sectors or safe haven asset classes such as cash or consumer staples or utilities. However, you can dull that downward volatility on your portfolio by d– with diversification. So a good approach I often refer to is having a barbell approach.

You wanna be able to focus on stocks that offer that upside potential and also be opportunistic when the prices decline, but you also wanna have that income generation on the other side of the barbell, and that helps to sort of minimize any downward volatility. Companies that tend to pay a dividend, you get paid to wait, so the stocks typically do not come off as much as in a volatile period. So we have a combination of both together in that barbell approach, where you’re focusing on both capital appreciation and income generation. It tends to really smooth out any downward pressure that’s created by volatility.

NB: All right, Steve. Well, thank you so much. I wanna jump over and wrap things up there. For everybody that’s listening in, go ahead and click the follow button on Steve’s page. Go read his article, see if there’s something in there that might be right for you. And then just for some housekeeping, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Content is offered for information purposes only. Unless stated otherwise, any and all individuals participating in the video are third parties that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.

Unless stated otherwise, the views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. The accuracy and completeness of content shared cannot be guaranteed. Seeking Alpha does not take account of your objectives or financial situation and does not offer any personalized investment advice. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker, US investment advisor, or investment bank. Thank you so much.

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M&S, New Look, Sainsbury’s and Oxfam have partnered with Circle-8 on The Circuit, a textile recycling project aiming to develop pathways to recover and sort non-reusable textiles for conversion into fibres for new clothes.

M&S, New Look, Sainsbury’s and Oxfam have joined forces to create a system that transforms discarded clothing into new raw materials.

The retailers and charity have announced a partnership with Circle-8, a start-up that has developed a model bringing together retailers, recovery organisations, recyclers, manufacturers and digital innovators to recycle end-of-life garments. The initiative, named The Circuit, will seek to establish pathways where old textiles can be sorted and pre-processed into future raw materials.

The goal is to forge new routes through which non-reusable textiles can be recovered, sorted and ultimately converted into new or emerging fibres for making fresh clothing. The scheme’s first phase, due to commence in January, will unite retailers and partners at Oxfam’s facility in Batley, West Yorkshire.

There they will explore automated textile sorting, develop reporting frameworks to enhance traceability, identify circular material opportunities and forge relationships with recyclers. The consortium will also develop the operational frameworks required to scale up the system so it can function on a large scale.

Additionally, it will seek to support the advancement of both mechanical and chemical recycling processes to recover materials for regional and global textile manufacturing.

As part of the scheme, Oxfam will play a crucial role in separating reusable and non-reusable textiles as well as operating the automated textile sorting equipment, the partners said. This follows findings from waste campaign group Wrap, which discovered that 1.4m tonnes of textiles were thrown away across the UK in 2024, with approximately half estimated to consist of non-reusable materials.

A report from Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee also estimates that 30% of worn clothes are resold in the UK while the remainder are sent overseas, often ending up in massive waste dumps in countries such as Ghana and Pakistan.

Rachel Cosgrove-Pearce, retail director at Oxfam, said: “Oxfam has been giving clothes a second life for almost 80 years, and our experience tells us that keeping clothing in use for as long as possible is one of the most effective ways to reduce fashion’s impact on our planet. But we also urgently need better solutions for textiles that can no longer be worn or reused.

“Developing the infrastructure to recover valuable fibres from end-of-use textiles is an important part of building a fashion system that uses fewer virgin resources and creates less environmental harm, and The Circuit brings together the expertise and investment needed to move this forward at scale.”

More broadly, the group stated that the project would seek to bolster the wider UK economy through job creation and manufacturing opportunities. The retailers also stressed that developing a more circular fashion industry would demand greater collaboration across the sector.

Ben Smith, managing director of Sainsbury’s Tu Clothing, said: “Creating a more circular future for textiles will take collaboration and innovation across the whole industry.

“The Circuit is an exciting opportunity to work alongside partners from across the value chain to explore how post-consumer textiles generated here in the UK can be given a new life as valuable raw materials.”

Katharine Beacham, head of sustainability and materials in fashion at M&S, said: “(We) believe the most sustainable clothing is clothing that is worn and loved for longer. However, when textiles reach the end of their usable life, we need better solutions to recover and recycle the materials they contain.”

Cyndi Rhoades, chief executive of Circle-8 Textile Ecosystems, said: “The retailers who help build circular textile value chains today will be best positioned to influence and benefit from them tomorrow. Through The Circuit, we’re powering the relationships, infrastructure and commercial frameworks needed to make that possible.”

Players of “Rocket League,” the vehicular soccer game developed by Psyonix and published by Epic Games, began reporting connectivity problems Wednesday, with outage-tracking service Downdetector logging a spike in user complaints starting at 11:37 a.m. Eastern time and the hashtag #RocketLeagueDown trending on social platform X as affected players compared notes on the disruption.

Downdetector’s official account posted an alert shortly after the spike began, asking users how the outage was affecting them and directing them to submit detailed reports through the platform. As of the alert, the scope, cause and expected duration of the disruption had not been detailed in any official statement from Psyonix or Epic Games.

“Rocket League,” first released in July 2015, has remained one of the most consistently popular multiplayer games in the years since its debut, combining elements of soccer with rocket-powered vehicle combat across competitive online matches. The game transitioned to a free-to-play model in September 2020, a shift that coincided with a notable server outage of its own at the time, when the game’s servers went down within roughly an hour of the free-to-play version going live, an incident that drew widespread criticism from the gaming community at the time given Epic Games’ scale and resources.

Server reliability has remained a recurring point of frustration among segments of the Rocket League player base in the years since. Complaints about inconsistent ping times, packet loss and general server performance have circulated periodically on platforms including Steam’s community discussion boards, with some longtime players describing persistent connectivity issues that predate Wednesday’s reported outage by several years.

Not every reported connectivity issue necessarily reflects a problem on Psyonix’s own servers. Independent outage-tracking services that monitor Rocket League’s status have noted that isolated reports can sometimes stem from a player’s own internet connection, device or local network configuration rather than a broader, service-wide outage affecting all users simultaneously. Multiple monitoring services checked in the days leading up to Wednesday’s reported spike had shown no significant ongoing issues with the game, with one service reporting typical volumes of fewer than one outage report per day over the prior month, suggesting Wednesday’s spike in complaints represented a departure from the game’s recent baseline level of reported problems.

Players experiencing issues are typically advised by these same monitoring services to first rule out problems on their own end before assuming a broader outage is underway, including checking their internet connection speed, restarting their gaming device or console, and confirming that both the Rocket League client and the underlying Epic Games Launcher, which the game continues to run through even after its transition away from Steam-exclusive distribution in past years, are fully updated to their latest versions. For players seeking to confirm whether a reported issue reflects a broader outage rather than a problem isolated to their own setup, official channels, including the Epic Games status page and Psyonix’s own social media accounts, are generally considered more authoritative sources than crowdsourced outage trackers alone, which can occasionally lag behind or imprecisely characterize the true scope of a still-developing technical issue.

Epic Games, which acquired Psyonix in 2019, operates a broader ecosystem of connected services, including the Epic Games Launcher and Epic Games Store, that can occasionally experience their own independent technical issues separate from any specific game built on top of that infrastructure. Because Rocket League relies on Epic’s underlying account and launcher systems even for players accessing the game through other storefronts, disruptions to Epic’s broader account services have, in some past incidents, produced symptoms that affected Rocket League access even when the game’s own dedicated servers remained functional.

Downdetector, the platform that first flagged Wednesday’s disruption, aggregates user-submitted problem reports alongside automated monitoring signals to identify spikes in complaints for a given online service, generating alerts when reports exceed typical baseline levels for that platform and time of day. The service has become a widely used first stop for gamers and other internet users seeking to quickly confirm whether a disruption they are personally experiencing reflects a broader, service-wide issue rather than a problem confined to their own device or connection.

As of the most recent available information, neither Psyonix nor Epic Games had issued a detailed public statement specifying the root cause of Wednesday’s reported disruption, and it remained unclear whether the issue was affecting all platforms and regions equally or was concentrated among a specific subset of players. Given Rocket League’s continued popularity and its large, active online player base years after its original release, even a relatively brief service disruption tends to generate significant attention on social media, as reflected in Wednesday’s trending hashtag, with affected players likely to continue monitoring both Downdetector and official Psyonix and Epic Games channels for updates on when normal service is expected to be fully restored.