SolarSquare, an Indian rooftop solar startup that helps households and housing societies adopt solar power, is in advanced talks to raise fresh capital after securing India’s largest solar venture investment in December 2024, TechCrunch has learned.

B Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners are set to co-lead the Series C round, which could value SolarSquare at between $450 million and $500 million and bring in $55 million to $60 million in new investment, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That would represent more than a doubling of SolarSquare’s valuation in roughly 18 months — a sign of how rapidly investor conviction is building around India’s residential solar market.

Lightspeed Venture Partners previously led SolarSquare’s $40 million Series B round at around a $200 million post-money valuation in December 2024. This time, according to a source, it’s investing through its growth fund, which has backed names such as Razorpay — India’s leading digital payments platform — and Zepto, the fast-delivery startup.

Existing investor Elevation Capital is also expected to participate in the deal, which is currently in advanced stages and is expected to close next month. The terms could still change as the financing has not yet been finalized. SolarSquare has raised $61.1 million in equity financing to date, per the startup data platform Tracxn.

India has set a target of achieving 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, with solar expected to contribute more than half of that total. The country became the world’s third-largest solar power producer in 2025, trailing only China and the U.S. Its cumulative installed solar capacity has surged from about 3 GW in 2014 to more than 150 GW in 2026, aided partly by government incentives and subsidy schemes aimed at accelerating rooftop solar adoption.

Mumbai-headquartered SolarSquare, founded in 2015, is positioning itself as a full-stack residential solar platform in a market that remains highly fragmented, dominated by small local installers and dealer networks tied to component manufacturers such as Tata Power, Waaree Energies, Luminous Power Technologies, and Exide Industries. The startup designs, installs, and maintains rooftop solar systems for homes, housing societies (the apartment complexes and gated communities common across urban India), and enterprises, and has installed more than 150 megawatts of solar capacity with a presence across 29 cities in nine states, per its website.

SolarSquare has powered nearly 50,000 homes and around 400 housing societies, according to a source. The startup has also deployed rooftop solar systems for large enterprises including Swiggy, Zepto, and iD Fresh Food.

Residential customers and housing societies now account for a majority of SolarSquare’s business, according to people familiar with the startup’s operations, as the startup has increasingly scaled back lower-margin industrial rooftop solar projects in recent years.

The startup has crossed an annualized revenue run rate of more than ₹10 billion (around $104 million) across homes and housing societies combined, according to a source familiar with the matter. It also aims to reach 200 megawatts in its residential solar portfolio this year, the source added.

SolarSquare declined to comment. B Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Elevation Capital did not respond to requests for comment.

OSes

A massive compilation of historic OSes and the emulators to run them

The Virtual OS Museum is an epic collection of historically
significant operating systems, representing more than 600 OSes across upwards of 250
platforms. It’s all local, so you’ll need a good few gigs of space.

The Virtual OS Museum is a
giant mixtape for enthusiasts of the history of OS evolution. As an
indication of its breadth of coverage, it reaches all the way back to
the Manchester
Baby – from 1948. Multics, the Xerox Alto, NeXTstep, PowerPC Mac OS
X, early versions of Windows NT and Android, and more.

It is one hefty layer-cake of code. The project offers two versions to
download. The Full edition is a whopping 121 GB download,
which unpacks to 174 GB, but includes everything ready for offline use.
If that’s a little indigestible, there’s also a “Lite” edition which
includes the various emulators, but not the all the disk and tape images
of actual vintage OSes: those are downloaded and run on first use. This
is a mere 14 GB download, which expands to 21 GB of space.

The download contains an x86 Linux VM, and inside that are the
various emulators, which are listed on the Credits page. The VM
should run on most things: the README has instructions
for launching it on Linux, and on both macOS and Windows on both x86-64
and Arm64. On Linux and Windows it runs inside VirtualBox, and on macOS
inside QEMU. Either way, the package will install and configure the
hypervisor for you if needed – including adding itself to an existing
copy, if you already have it installed.

There’s a lot in here: the homepage has a section with 45
screenshots and there’s a second page with over 100
more.

This means that its licensing is a little complicated. The
launcher and its configuration is distributed under the MAME
license, which keeps source code available but prohibits commercial
use. The metadata of the various OSes is distributed under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.
As for the many OSes themselves, the license page merely says:

Everything else retains its original license. Any commercial software
in this collection is included for purposes of historical research and
preservation only

This is followed by a note that nothing in the compilation is still
available for retail sale anywhere, and a request for copyright holders to contact
the author if they want anything removed.

That author is Canadian developer Andrew
Warkentin, who also has a blog called Andrew’s OS Lab, plus a Gitlab instance, holding the
project’s scripts, config
and website, and for his unfinished RTOS UX/RT.

It’s an impressive assembly. Although this vulture suspects that he’s
already tried quite a few of the contents, this is a vastly larger
collection than we’ve ever assembled. Part of the value here is that it
contains snapshots of various important steps in the evolution of modern
computers – including things outside of the main sequence. So many such
emulators exist because somebody somewhere got curious and went looking
for some relics of code gone by and built tools to run it – but to do
that, you need to know that it existed.

If you don’t already know, then this browsable catalog of OSes running via emulation is your illustrated and interactive
guide. It’s way more interesting to play with these old systems than
just watch videos, and at least for us, it’s more interesting to run it
on your own computer than inside an web page. 

We’ve also personally
failed fairly hard at getting some ancient mainframe OSes running,
because the meager available documentation assumes that if you’re
interested enough to want to try something, that means that you already
know about it. When it comes to very early mainframes, for example, the
Reg FOSS desk definitely doesn’t – even though our knowledge
reaches back to the early 1980s. On that note, we also like Warkentin’s mention
that if you break the emulated system, then there is a button to restore
to a working snapshot.

In his introductory video, he says that it’s a
work-in-progress and he has enough additional candidates yet to add to
push the collection to over 2,000 different entries. An updater is
included, so you won’t have to re-download the whole thing. He also,
slightly disarmingly, does admit that not every single one has been
tested yet, and that he’s publishing it partly in the hopes of finding
employment. 

We wish him luck. ®

Moon’s Compass Collection has swollen with the addition of two new models in the 491 network player and 461 power amp.

Here’s the lowdown on specs and features for both.

The Moon 491 is a “fully featured network player, preamplifier, DAC, phono stage and headphone amplifier”, so suffice to say it’s a talented bit of kit that’s been built to serve as the hub “of a high-performance audio system”.

Combining digital and analogue connectivity, the 491 has been devised to deliver low-noise performance all the while maintaining the clarity, refinement and musicality that Moon’s products have become know for.

As usual the MiND 2 streaming platform serves at the core of its streaming performance, incorporating support for Roon Ready, UPnP streaming, AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth. Virtually every major streaming service under the sun is supported, a list that includes Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer and Spotify, available through the Moon MiND Controller app (iOS and Android). The ‘Connect’ versions of Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify are also supported for connecting straight to hi-fi kit.

The phono stage supports both MM and MC cartridges, and can be adjusted to allow precise cartridge matching for “optimised vinyl playback”.

The proprietary Moon Hybrid power (MHP) supply is said to improve channel separation, reduce crosstalk and enhance current delivery, in particular with low-impedance loudspeakers.

The Moon 461 power amplifier can act as a partner for the 491 network player, with its “substantual output capability” that amounts to 150W per channel, low distortion and stable performance across a “wide range” of loudspeaker loads, Moon says this is able to preserve signal integrity “with transparency, dynamic expression and composure”.

Serving as the 461’s heart is Moon’s proprietary MDCA (Moon Distortion-Cancelling Amplifier) architecture that was initially developed for its North Collection. It can significantly reduce distortion and imrpove linearity, which Moon says results in “faithful reproduction and exceptional clarirty and precision”.

Available in the UK from July onwards, the Moon 491 is priced at £5950 and the Moon 461 at £4550.

Photograph: Michael Calore

The walls of the bag are tough enough, made from 1,200-denier polyester, which is heavy-duty and water-resistant, not to mention so rugged that it’s nearly indestructible. I’ve checked it as luggage on a dozen or so flights, and it doesn’t show any scuffs or tears. The zipper at the top isn’t sealed, but it’s heavier than it needs to be and works just fine in the rain. What truly sets the bag apart, though, is its lining. The whole interior of the tote is coated with a thin layer of thermoplastic, further increasing its imperviousness to moisture.

Photograph: Michael Calore

Photograph: Michael Calore

Now, of course, the purpose of this kind of lining is to keep the contents dry when you use the bag in a wet environment, like on a canoe trip, on a rainy bike ride, or on a duck hunt in the Maine wilderness. And surely, I have used the bag in a canoe and on many a rainy bike ride (I’ve never been on a duck hunt), and the goods inside have indeed always remained intact. I even trust the bag enough to carry electronics and musical equipment to the office or studio on drizzly mornings. But for me, the utility the bag provides is more so the opposite: it’s an excellent place to cleanly transport items that are, themselves, muddy, wet, or slimy.

For example, I’ve taken the bag car camping several times. Once, I used it to pack my tent, ground cloth, boots, and rain shell. On the last day of the trip, it poured outside, and upon it being time to head home, my rain jacket and tent were soaked, the ground cloth was dotted with wet pine needles and flecks of bark, and my boots had a thick layer of Mendocino, California, muck in the tread. I crammed all of those items in the Hunter’s Tote, zipped it up, and tossed it into the back seat of my rental car. The interior lining kept the mess inside, saving the rental car’s tuck-and-roll upholstery. Back home, I emptied the tote, flipped it inside out, and blasted out all the forest flooring with a hose.

There are two heavy plastic tabs on the edges of the tote, one at each end of the zipper. This is where the shoulder strap clips in. I’ve never really used the strap (honestly, it just gets in the way), but those tabs are great for hanging the tote to dry after rinsing it out.

The Hunter’s Tote comes in three sizes. I have the largest, the XL, which has a capacity of 53 liters. (That’s huge for a tote bag.) I prefer the larger size because when you set the reinforced bottom on a flat surface and prop the mouth of the bag open, you have a generous flat bottom inside of 10 by 19 inches. All that room really makes the bag more versatile, so my recommendation is to go large.

Also, just know there are no frills here: no exterior pockets, no padding, no laptop sleeve. Just a rugged carrier that’s ready for your dirtiest work. Whether you’re carrying twelvers of La Croix or bagging Buffleheads, it’s indispensable.

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Anthropic disclosed on Friday that Project Glasswing, its restricted cybersecurity initiative, has uncovered more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerability candidates across some of the most systemically important software in the world since the programme went live one month ago. Of those, 1,726 have been validated as true positives. 1,094 are confirmed high- or critical-severity flaws. Only 97 have been patched.

The gap between those numbers is the story. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier model with specialised capabilities for finding vulnerabilities in source code, can identify flaws at a pace that the open-source ecosystem cannot absorb. The 6,202 high- or critical-severity candidates affect more than 1,000 open-source projects. Eighty-eight advisories have been issued. The rate of discovery is orders of magnitude faster than the rate of remediation.

“The relative ease of finding vulnerabilities compared with the difficulty of fixing them amounts to a major challenge for cybersecurity,” Anthropic acknowledged. The company is urging software developers to shorten patch cycles and make security fixes available as quickly as possible. Oracle has already shifted from quarterly to monthly patch releases to address the acceleration. Microsoft has warned that the number of monthly patches it expects to release will “continue trending larger for some time.”

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The most notable finding so far is a critical flaw in WolfSSL (CVE-2026-5194, CVSS score 9.1), a widely used embedded TLS library, that could allow an attacker to forge certificates and impersonate a legitimate service. WolfSSL is deployed across IoT devices, automotive systems, and industrial control environments where a certificate forgery vulnerability carries consequences well beyond conventional web security.

Glasswing operates through a restricted partnership model. Approximately 50 organisations, described by Anthropic as the most systemically important cyber defenders, have access to Claude Mythos Preview. The model has not been released to the general public. XBOW, an autonomous offensive security platform, described Mythos Preview as “a major advance” that is “substantially better than prior models at finding vulnerability candidates” and “adept at analysing source code with a security mindset.” Cloudflare’s analysis found the model excels at turning individual vulnerabilities into end-to-end attack chains, a capability that is as useful for defenders building threat models as it is dangerous in the wrong hands.

The defensive applications extend beyond vulnerability discovery. In one case, a Glasswing partner bank used Claude Mythos to detect and prevent a fraudulent $1.5 million wire transfer after an attacker breached a customer’s email account and made spoof phone calls. The model identified the fraud pattern before the transfer was executed. The use case illustrates Anthropic’s argument that frontier AI models can provide asymmetric advantages to defenders, but only if access is restricted to organisations with the maturity to use them responsibly.

The timing aligns with a broader acceleration in AI-related security disclosures. Cyera’s Claw Chain vulnerabilities in OpenClaw, disclosed earlier this month, demonstrated how attackers can weaponise an AI agent’s own sandbox privileges. Koi Security’s audit of ClawHub found 341 malicious entries among 2,857 available AI agent skills. The pattern is consistent: AI is simultaneously creating new attack surfaces and providing more powerful tools to find flaws in existing ones. The question is which side of the equation moves faster.

Anthropic has launched a Cyber Verification Program that allows vetted security professionals to use Claude without guardrails for legitimate purposes including vulnerability research, penetration testing, and red teaming. OpenAI has introduced a parallel programme called Daybreak, which provides similar access to GPT-5.5-Cyber. Neither Mythos Preview nor GPT-5.5-Cyber has been released to the general public due to concerns that adequate safeguards to prevent large-scale misuse do not yet exist.

The competitive dynamic between Anthropic and OpenAI in the cybersecurity space is intensifying. Both companies are positioning their frontier models as essential infrastructure for national and corporate cyber defence, while simultaneously restricting access to prevent the same capabilities from being used offensively. The dual-use nature of the technology creates a policy challenge that neither company has fully resolved: if models with Mythos-level capabilities become broadly available, as Anthropic itself acknowledges is likely in the near future, the current model of restricting access to 50 trusted partners will not hold.

Anthropic’s publicly available Claude models are already among the most capable coding assistants on the market. The gap between what Mythos can do and what the public-facing Claude can do is narrowing with each release. Anthropic is urging organisations to prepare for a world in which these capabilities are widely accessible by hardening network configurations, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and maintaining comprehensive logs for detection and response.

Ten thousand vulnerability candidates in one month from 50 partners using one model. The software ecosystem now has a tool that can find flaws faster than developers can fix them. That is both the promise and the problem. Anthropic calls Glasswing an asymmetric advantage for defenders. It is. But asymmetric advantages tend to be temporary, and the clock on this one is already running.

Shopping for a Dyson vacuum is an experience. There are many models to navigate and serious price tags on most of them. As someone who tests vacuums for a living, I have to admit that a Dyson blows most other vacuums away. There are a few cheaper models I’ll still grab (check out my full guide to cordless and robot vacuums for more recommendations), but if you’re dreaming of a Dyson, this weekend is a great time to buy.

Several Dyson models I love are on sale for the long weekend. This weekend’s sale includes Dyson’s newest robot vacuum and the PencilVac that I can’t stop using, and my overall favorites like the V15 Detect and Gen5Detect, and more models our team has loved using. Read on to find out every on-sale Dyson I’d buy this weekend.

Best Dyson Vacuums on Sale for Memorial Day

The Best Dyson for the Price

If you’re looking for the best features for the best price, I already recommend the Dyson V15 Detect when it’s not on sale, making this an even better time to buy. You’ll get both a Fluffy Optic cleaner head and a Digital Motorbar cleaner head to use for hard floors, carpet, or rugs, trigger control, and details about the particles you suck up while you vacuum. It’s lightweight and easy to use anywhere in the house, and the hour-long battery life should be plenty for a whole-home clean.

A More Powerful Dyson

Dyson’s more powerful stick vacuum is the Gen5Detect, which is a great option if you have pets since it has a faster motor with more suction power than the V15 Detect to suck up more pet hair (it’s our top vacuum for pet hair for a reason) and has a HEPA filter to keep allergens contained inside of the vacuum instead of being released back into the air. It also comes with a true power button, so you don’t have to hold onto the trigger button the entire time to use it. Similar to the V15 Detect, it comes with both a Digital Motorbar cleaner head and a Fluffy Optic cleaner head to use on carpet and hard floors, respectively. You’ll also get two more attachments, plus a built-in dusting and crevice tool (it’s nice not to have to wonder where this attachment is!) It’s an expensive vacuum, but well worth the investment when it’s on sale.

If You Only Have Hard Floors

I shouldn’t like the PencilVac so much, but I find myself reaching for it often, and I think it’s plenty worth its abilities when it’s on sale. Part of what makes it so easy to grab compared to my other stick vacuums is how easy it is to store and keep charged with the freestanding charging base, letting it stand wherever I like in my home as long as there’s an outlet nearby. The PencilVac has two versions, the Fluffy and Fluffycones, with the latter having a design that has fluffy cone-shaped rollers to best collect debris. It is limited to only hard floors and has a short battery life, but I love how maneuverable and lightweight this vacuum is. It’s usually a high price tag for its abilities, and even on sale, it’s not what I would call cheap, but it’s a great, quick daily vacuum.

Dyson’s Latest Robot Vac

Dyson’s newest robot vacuum, the Spot+Scrub Ai, is its first that doubles as both a vacuum and a mop. It has a large base station that reminds me of Dyson’s vacuums, since the dry debris canister is clear and rounded like the ones you’d see attached to a Dyson stick vacuum or one of its upright models. It does a good job mopping and vacuuming, and can learn multiple floors, and the navigation has improved since the older Dyson 306 Vis Nav. Still, it’s not perfect navigation, since the camera sits below the top of the vacuum and doesn’t always see low-profile furniture that it’ll bump into. If you don’t have a ton of low furniture (or tons of IKEA pieces, as I do), this vacuum could be just perfect for you.

A Stick Vac and Mop

If you want a vacuum that doubles as a mop, look no further than this variation of the V15 Detect that’s also on sale for the holiday weekend. The V15s Detect Submarine comes with the Submarine wet roller head that transforms it from a regular Dyson vacuum (that still comes with both the Fluffy optic cleaner head and Digital motorbar cleaner head for you to use on hard floors and carpet) into a wet roller mop. You can’t buy a regular V15 Detect and add this attachment on; this V15s is made to work with this Submarine head. You’ll fill the small reservoir on the roller head with water and can start mopping away, but you will have to rinse the mop head afterwards by hand, which is a little gross.

A Handheld-Only Dyson

If you’re not looking to spend a ton but want a Dyson that’s super portable and great for stairs, cars, and even boats, the Dyson Car+Boat is made for that. It’s in the name, after all. This handheld-only vacuum packs solid power and has a great battery life for a handheld vacuum. It uses a trigger-style control like the V15 Detect, which I actually find ideal for cleaning compact spaces like stairs and cars so that you’re not fumbling to switch it off as you move around the car or to the next set of stairs. It’s an affordable way to get into the Dyson ecosystem, especially since it’s on sale.

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The SpaceX IPO prospectus, filed on Wednesday, contains a vision for terawatt-scale space-based solar power. It also reveals, through what it does not say, that Elon Musk’s AI company xAI is running its data centres on unregulated natural gas turbines, with plans to buy $2.8 billion more. Tesla, the company Musk built on the promise of eliminating fossil fuels, barely features as a power supplier. The contradiction is now a matter of SEC record.

Tesla has released four Master Plans over the years. The through line has been consistent: electrification of the economy. In 2006, Musk described Tesla’s “overarching purpose” as helping “expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.” Just three years ago, Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 outlined a detailed path to eliminate fossil fuels entirely. The document was rigorous, optimistic, and specific about the role of terrestrial solar, battery storage, and electrified transport in decarbonising the global economy.

Then xAI arrived. The AI company, which merged with SpaceX in February at a combined $1.25 trillion valuation, has embraced the mine-and-burn economy that Tesla was founded to replace. Dozens of unregulated natural gas turbines power xAI’s data centres in Memphis, Tennessee. The $2.8 billion in additional gas turbine purchases disclosed in the filing is not a temporary measure with an expiration date. It is a capital commitment that cements fossil fuel infrastructure into xAI’s operations for years.

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Musk’s companies are not strangers to buying from each other. SpaceX spent $131 million on 1,279 Cybertrucks. xAI has spent $697 million over the past two years on Tesla Megapacks, the grid-scale battery storage systems used to manage peak loads at its data centres. But xAI has not purchased a materially significant number of solar panels from Tesla Energy, the division that exists specifically to deploy the technology Musk once described as the foundation of the future economy.

The SpaceX filing does mention solar, but only in the context of space. The company argues that space-based solar arrays can generate “more than five times the energy” of terrestrial ones thanks to continuous illumination. As AI data centres have encountered opposition on Earth, from neighbours, regulators, and grid operators, Musk and other executives have begun floating the idea of operating server racks in orbit, powered by 24/7 sunshine. SpaceX’s Starship programme, which has cost more than $15 billion to date, is positioned as the launch vehicle that could make this economically viable.

The economics, as TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant notes, are challenging at best. Power prices for Starlink satellites are already multiples higher than what a terrestrial data centre typically spends. Protecting AI chips from radiation, thermal cycling, and micrometeorites in orbit adds cost that does not exist on the ground. It is also unclear whether AI training workloads can be distributed across multiple satellites, which would leave a significant portion of the most compute-intensive AI work earthbound regardless of how cheap launches become. Shipping solar panels on a flatbed truck uses less energy than sending them into orbit.

The filing contains a more revealing claim. SpaceX argues that “third-party estimates on data centre demand are constrained by the practical supply limitations that exist in a terrestrial context and the power shortage may be far greater than what research estimates suggest.” The company references “terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth,” a figure that would represent a transformative increase in global energy demand. Humanity currently uses approximately 4 terawatts on a continuous basis. All the world’s data centres together consume roughly 40 gigawatts. Musk is projecting that AI alone will require additions measured in terawatts, every year.

The SpaceX IPO, expected to raise $75 billion next month, will be priced partly on the strength of this vision. Investors are being asked to buy into a future where terrestrial energy infrastructure is fundamentally insufficient for AI demand, and SpaceX is the company that can solve the problem from space. It is a compelling narrative. It is also a narrative that conveniently excuses the fact that, right now, Musk’s AI company is burning natural gas instead of deploying the solar technology his other company manufactures.

The energy problem for AI data centres is real. OpenAI paused its Stargate UK project over industrial electricity costs that run at more than four times US rates. Global data centre power consumption is projected to reach 150 GW by 2030. The question is not whether AI will need more energy, but whether the answer is to build more terrestrial solar, which has fallen in cost by 90% over the past decade and can be deployed at scale today, or to wait for a technology that requires launching hardware into orbit on rockets that, as of Friday, still cannot land their boosters reliably.

Tesla’s solar and energy storage business generated $2.8 billion in revenue in Q1 2026 alone. The Megapack factory in Lathrop, California ships grid-scale batteries to utilities and industrial customers worldwide. Tesla Energy is, by any measure, one of the most successful clean energy companies on the planet. And yet its founder’s newest company chose gas turbines instead.

Enterprise AI spending is accelerating at extraordinary rates. Salesforce projects $300 million in Anthropic token spending this year. The compute infrastructure behind that spending requires energy, and the companies building it are making choices right now about where that energy comes from. Musk’s choice, for xAI, was fossil fuel. His justification, via SpaceX, is that something better is coming from space. The gap between those two positions is filled with natural gas, and the Master Plan that was supposed to eliminate it.

• AMOS relies on users executing malicious terminal commands themselves
• Sophos MDR identified ClickFix-style social engineering in macOS attacks
• Half of macOS stealer reports involved AMOS, but Apple is fighting back

Atomic macOS Stealer, also known as AMOS, is a persistent macOS security threat because it does not need sophisticated zero-day vulnerabilities to compromise Apple devices.

Instead, this malware family repeatedly exploits ordinary user behaviour by tricking users into typing a single command into their own Terminal application.

Tannoy is marking its 100th anniversary with a major loudspeaker announcement at HIGH END Vienna 2026, where the legendary British speaker maker will unveil exclusive limited-edition models and signal the return of several iconic designs. The anniversary lineup begins with special versions of the Westminster Royal GR and Canterbury GR, both based on the Prestige Gold Reference Series and produced in extremely limited numbers that nod directly to Tannoy’s 1926 founding in South London.

Tannoy’s first 100th anniversary Limited Editions will be produced in extremely small numbers: 19 pairs of the flagship Westminster Royal GR and 26 pairs of the Canterbury GR. The production figures are intentional, combining to reference 1926, the year Tannoy was founded in South London. Anniversary upgrades are said to, “incorporate significant performance upgrades, including enhanced crossovers and improved internal cabling.” Additional anniversary models are expected to be added to the range in the coming months.

Westminster Royal GR

At HIGH END 2026 in Vienna, Tannoy will give attendees a rare chance to hear the Westminster Royal GR, the brand’s flagship Prestige loudspeaker and one of the most recognizable large-format designs in British hi-fi.

The Westminster Royal GR is a two-way, horn-loaded loudspeaker built around a 15-inch Tannoy Dual Concentric driver, a driver architecture first introduced by the company in 1947. This is not a compact lifestyle box pretending to be heritage audio. At 140 cm tall, 55 inches, and weighing 140 kg, 309 pounds, the Westminster Royal GR is closer to furniture with a passport and a solicitor.

Key acoustic technologies include Tannoy’s PepperPot WaveGuide, Alnico magnets, and aluminium-magnesium alloy diaphragm compression drivers with Mylar surrounds. The massive 530-litre birch ply cabinet uses extensive internal bracing and Tannoy’s Differential Materials Technology, which couples the drive unit to the cabinet using materials of varying density to help control resonance, improve damping, and reduce unwanted vibration.

The cabinet is finished in oiled walnut veneer with hand-selected burr walnut inlays, because when a loudspeaker weighs more than some motorcycles, it may as well look like it belongs in a country estate.

The Westminster Royal GR has a sensitivity rating of 99 dB. This contributes to better compatibility with amplifiers from high-powered transistors to low-powered tube amplifiers, while bass extension reaches down to 18 Hz for full-bandwidth reproduction.

At HIGH END Vienna 2026, the Tannoy Westminster Royal GR will be demonstrated with high-performance electronics from Esoteric and cabling from Montaudio, giving attendees a properly configured listen to one of Tannoy’s most ambitious loudspeaker designs. Not exactly the kind of speaker you casually wedge between a media console and a ficus.

Tannoy says full specifications, pricing, and imagery for the wider range of special edition models will be released when the lineup formally launches later this year. Until then, the Vienna showing is effectively the preview: limited information, very large cabinets, and enough British hi-fi gravitas to make the carpet nervous.

Comparison

The Bottom Line 

Tannoy’s 100th anniversary lineup is shaping up to be more than a commemorative badge and a nicer veneer. The limited-edition Westminster Royal GR and Canterbury GR lean into real heritage, serious engineering, and deliberately tiny production numbers tied to 1926, the year Tannoy was founded.

Who buys these? Tannoy loyalists, collectors, and serious audiophiles with the room, budget, and structural flooring to handle them. The Westminster Royal GR is not for casual listening in a condo. It is for someone who wants one of British hi-fi’s most iconic loudspeakers and is willing to build a system, and possibly a room, around it.

The bigger story is still coming at HIGH END Vienna 2026. For now, Tannoy has shown the tip of the iceberg, and it appears to be wearing oiled walnut.

Price & Availability

The Tannoy UK team will be available at HIGH END Vienna to discuss the anniversary models in Hall X2, E06, as well as at the nearby Tech Gate demonstration area.

We don’t have final pricing or availability on the Anniversary models, but the regular versions of the each model are priced from $28K to $60K at upscaleaudio.com.

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