As 2024 draws to a close, the tech industry reflects on year of ups, downs and just, so many elections.
In a year of global uncertainty, the tech industry has not been without its shakeups, with some firms pulling in megarounds and inspiring hope, while many others still saw the grim approach of administration.
Here is UKTN‘s tech winners and losers for 2024:
Revolut – Winner
Revolut’s rise since being founded in 2015 has been unstoppable, and this year it reached some incredible milestones.
Having reached 50 million customers in just a decade, Revolut celebrated with a two-day event headlined by the biggest pop star of the year Charli XCX as well as talks from entrepreneur, Steven Bartlett and Revolut CEO, Nik Storonsky.
However, aside from its highest ever pre-tax profits of £438m and its 50 million customers, the biggest win for Revolut this year is for the company have finally received a UK bank authorisation, with restrictions, three years after submitting its application.
Zapp – Loser
The London-based rapid grocery delivery platform was forced to lay off most of its staff in attempts to cut costs and losses.
Having raised $200m in a serious B funding round in 2022, Zapp experienced significant losses in 2022, which lead the company to pull out of France and Netherlands and focus on its operations in London.
Th cuts did, however, see the firm slash its pre-tax losses by three-quarters, from £91.9m in 2022 to £23m in 2023.
Zapp has now axed 90% of staff from 2,417 to 260, which has seen staff costs drop by over 80% from £51m to £8.6m.
Arm – Winner
The Cambridge-based chip designer was founded over 30 years ago but this year has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom, experiencing nearly a 100% year-to-date stock increase, to become the UK’s first ever £100bn tech company.
As a leading provider of energy-efficient processor IP designs, Arm generate revenue by licensing its technology designs.
It has managed to dominate the mobile phone market, with 99% of smartphones running on Arm-based processors, with half of all CPU chips being Arm-based.
Japanese investment company SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for £24bn, taking the company private. Since becoming public again in the final quarter of 2023, Arm has had a meteoric rise on the stock market.
AI’s processing power demands have seen more companies turning to Arm’s energy-efficient semi-conductor designs, such as tech giant Nvidia, giving it a 98% year-to-date stock increase.
Arrival – Loser
Founded in 2015 and once valued at £9bn, Arrival was set to shake up the entire car manufacturing industry with a promise of being able to cheaply produce electric vehicles via microfactories.
The fairytale all came to an end at the beginning of the year with Arrival entering administration and having its shares suspended from trading in late January, putting 172 UK jobs at risk.
Having experienced consistent burn rate issues and heavy losses leading up to its administration, not even a £40m bridge loan could save it as it collapsed owing over £1bn.
Wayve – Winner
Wayve, the self-driving technology startup raised an impressive $1bn (£840m) in a funding round back in May, making it the largest ever venture investment for a European AI firm.
The funding round was led by SoftBank but also had investment from Nvidia and Microsoft and later extended to Uber.
The rapid growth of Wayve and fellow British self-driving software firm Oxa was a major boost to the UK’s push to become an AI superpower, garnering support from the UK government.
Monese – Loser
Founded in 2015, Monese was the UK’s first app-based bank, attracting more than two million customers across Europe.
The fintech gained $35m investment from HSBC in 2022, and was able to count PayPal and British Airways owner IAG amongst its shareholders.
However, just two years on from its investment, HSBC cut the value of its stake in Monese to zero and left the fintech in major uncertainty.
Monese needed to be rescued by an injection from Cardiff-based fintech Pockit, who specialise in lending money to low-income customers with poor credit scores.
The £15m injection and acquisition by Pockit also saw Monese enter into a debt agreement with Pockit as the lenders in September.
Meatly – Winner
Meatly wasn’t just a big winner in the UK this year, it managed to become a world leader in its field.
Founded only two years ago, Meatly (formerly Good Dog Food) has been backed by Agronomics and Pets at Home and it has become a world leader in cultivated meat.
The company’s in-house scientists have developed a cultivated meat product which grows chicken meat using cells from a chicken egg, making a kinder, safer and more sustainable meat option for pets.
Having worked closely with the FSA, Defra and APHA, Meatly has been granted regulatory clearance to begin selling its cultivated chicken to manufacturers.
Although it won’t be scaling its production to industrial volumes for another three years, Meatly has become the first company to get approval to use and sell cultivated meat, and the UK the first European country to grant this.
Cazoo – Loser
The online used car dealer, Cazoo, which had previously sponsored the Premier League’s Everton and Aston Villa, entered administration this year.
Having exploded onto the scene thanks to the pandemic, Cazoo specialised in allowing customers to buy and sell used cars online with 72hr delivery, but was forced to restructure, changing from a dealership to a marketplace back in March.
Having previously been a unicorn valued at £5bn on the New York Stock Exchange with over 4,500 staff across Europe, Cazoo seemed to shaking up the order of car sales, but its value has dropped to as little as £23m and has less than 250 employees left.
Flo Health – Winner
Despite some controversy over the use of user information at the beginning of the year, the wins and the investments kept flowing for Flo Health.
Launched in 2016, Flo Health tracks every stage of a woman’s health goals and monitors menstruation, conception, pregnancy and menopause.
As the most downloaded women’s health app worldwide with over 100 million downloads, the femtech raised a $200m (£156m) Series C round led by private equity firm General Atlantic back in July.
This investment took its valuation over the $1bn milestone and officially made it a unicorn, and the first purely digital consumer women’s health app to achieve this status, though more than a few eyebrows were raised out the notion of Britain’s biggest femtech startup being co-founded and run by a man.
Gather – Loser
For many companies, celebrity investment usually provides a new lease of life which grants them more attention and fresh profit, but that wasn’t the case for the investment app, Gather.
Backed by Arsenal footballer Jorginho, Gather was an investment app designed to democratise access to funds from major asset managers, but months after the Italian’s investment, the company went into administration in August.
Having misunderstood the terms of the government’s Future Fund scheme, Gather owe repayment on a £3.6m loan from British Business Bank and a further £3.4m debt elsewhere, according to administrator documents filed in August.
Raspberry Pi – Winner
Raspberry Pi is as sweet as ever this year after giving a slice of its success to the London Stock Exchange.
Back in June, the budget computing firm from Cambridge exceeded the expectations of its first post-IPO report.
Having given an IPO price of 280p, Raspberry Pi’s shares reached 392p in early trading with shares soaring as high as 40%.
In a year where it launched its CM5 product, Raspberry Pi continues to heat up and prove that London’s stock market is still strong.
Shorts International – Loser
Shorts International is a British short film company that specialises in short films, and this year it fell short in a lawsuit against one of the biggest tech giants in the world – Google.
Shorts International sued Google for infringing the British company’s trademark of the word “shorts” with its YouTube app Shorts, designed to compete with TikTok’s meteoric rise in 2020.
Google, however, won that case after the judge ruled it was clear the Shorts platform came from YouTube and that there would be no confusion between the two, nor would Google and YouTube’s use of the word cause any “damage to the distinctive character or repute of (Shorts International’s) trademarks.”
Shorts International was very bold in its pursuit of a lawsuit against Google, but it maybe bit off more than it could chew going up against such a heavy hitter in the tech industry.
Monzo – Winner
2024 was the year of milestones for Monzo, the fintech unicorn that has soared to become the UK’s biggest challenger bank by number of customers.
Adding two million UK users in 12 months, Monzo announced that it had surpassed the 10 million user mark in July, only five million off of HSBC UK’s customer count.
The milestones don’t stop there as it also posted its first full year of profit in March with a pre-tax profit of £15.4m, hitting £880m revenue which is more than doubled from the £355.6m revenue of two years ago.
Despite facing some controversy surrounding a breach of UK banking regulations towards the end of the year, the fintech sought to quickly remedy the issue and managed to still have a successful year, achieving a mammoth valuation of £4.5bn.
Twig – Loser
The London based fintech raised $35m (£25.7m) in its Series A funding round back in 2022 and was a unique “bank of things” as it called itself, targeting millennials and gen Z.
Twig allowed users to “tokenise” and trade used items, using the cash to buy cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
However, just four years after its launch and Twig was forced to shut down and liquidate this year, leaving it with £15.4m in debt according to Companies House filings.
Octopus Energy – Winner
Very few would’ve been able to foresee just how successful the eight-year-old energy supplier would be, but 2024 was the year that confirmed its success.
Having agreed to acquire the failed energy supplier Bulb back in 2022, Octopus Energy’s final payment was made in September this year, paying £3bn to the government and generating a £1.5bn profit for it.
This acquisition not only ensured that most Bulb employees kept their jobs, but it also had no impact on prices for billpayers and taxpayers.
However, what was most impressive for the energy supplier this year was becoming the single largest electricity supplier in the UK, having surpassed British Gas after being the only large energy supplier to increase its market share, sitting with kraken valuation of $9bn.
Bank of London – Loser
It has been a turbulent year for the clearing bank which had a unicorn status to boast in 2021 having received its banking license, followed by an expansion to New York with a fancy new US headquarters.
However, this year saw the unravelling of the success of the fintech founded by former Barclays executive Anthony Watson, former Goldman Sachs president Harvey Schwartz and Labour Grandee Peter Mandelson on its board.
Bank of London was handed a winding up petition from HMRC in September, as the government were unable to collect unpaid taxes from the business.
The petition has since been withdrawn as the company say it has now paid all of its taxes, and shortly after announced that it had raised £42m in a fresh funding round as it looked to “move forward with new leadership.”
With its New York office now mostly vacant, the Bank of London will be hoping its recent investment will give the firm some much needed stability, but its struggles this year certainly mean that it’s had a year to forget.
Eleven Labs – Winner
The fireworks did not stop after New Year celebrations for ElevenLabs as it achieved unicorn status in January, a year after launching its first beta product in January of 2023.
The London-based AI text-to-speech firm raised $80m (£63m) in a Series B funding round to surpass the $1bn mark.
The unicorn were able to open a new office in London named its European HQ, and exceeded its target of doubling its 20 staff headcount with 90 staff now working for it.
However, the startup’s biggest achievement this year has been in its product offerings, having launched its latest voice-cloning and text-to-speech API product in November which grants users the ability to build conversational AI bots.
Shares – Loser
Having a successful debut year in 2021, the French based social trading app raised $80m (£66m) across its Series A and B funding rounds in 2022.
It also sought to embark across Europe, launching its app in the UK in 2022 with it now also operating in Poland and Belgium.
Its honeymoon in the UK quickly went south after it withdrew from the UK market this year, just two years after launching.
The firm have decided to focus on its operations in France and the rest of Europe.
Pragmatic Semiconductor – Winner
The chip manufacturer experienced another year of losses this year, having posted pre-tax losses of £37m for the year, up from the £22.8m pre-tax losses of 2022.
However, the business believe that the losses reflect a rise in investment plans, having raised £182m at the end of 2023.
This investment has certainly paid off with Pragmatic Semiconductors opening the UK’s first 300mm semiconductor wafer fab in Durham back in July, pushing it towards the title of the UK’s largest chip manufacturer by volume.
The new Durham manufacturing facility is not quite groundbreaking globally, but certainly puts the UK back into the mix in terms of chip production, finally getting government support after the CEO had threatened to move operations abroad due to lack of governmental support in 2023.
This is not just a win for Pragmatic, but a win for the semiconductor industry in the UK as it seeks to create a sturdy backbone of chip production should there be any disruptions from oversees productions.
Orka – Loser
The Manchester-based startup was founded in 2019 as a flexible working platform that offered flexible pay and labour to workers.
Orka had raised £29m in a funding round in 2021, though Tom Pickersgill, the founder and CEO has since revealed that it had raised £7m with the other £22m being a debt facility.
However, 2024 was the year that Orka sank, as it was forced into administration in April this year, after struggling to raise enough funds and owing over £500,000 upon the closure of the business.
2024 has been a very rough year for a lot of businesses, with so many being forced into administration because of the downturns in the UK’s funding market.
For others, this year has been a raging success, with chip designers and makers like Arm and Pragmatic Semiconductors showing that chip shop chips aren’t the only chips the UK can be proud, with milestones reached across the entire chipmaker industry for UK companies.
More impressive than all though is the incredible milestones Revolut has achieved this year, almost cementing itself as a household name after receiving its banking license and its 50 million customer milestone.
