[romanhn]

A different perspective: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2016375397131420005

TL;DR: What London actually built is Europe’s most efficient farm system for US acquirers. The city does the expensive, risky work of finding founders, funding early rounds, and proving product-market fit. American companies wait until the risk is de-risked, then buy the winners at discounts enabled by London’s shrinking public markets.

[alephnerd]

This.

Also UK contract law is well established and it's easy to find experienced transatlantic lawyers and firms (there's a reason UK lawyers can practice in NY and why both Hong Kong and the Emirate of Dubai kept poaching British judges with contract dispute into their business judiciary).

In most cases when we'd invest in a startup abroad, the founder would often structure their startup as a subsidiary of a US, UK, Singapore (especially Indian/Chinese startups), or Cayman Islands (it's a BOT so you basically get it for free) corporation.

Ironically, this ease of financial access is what makes it difficult to seed a lasting DeepTech startup in the UK because capital would often be deployed to invest in other startup ecosystems. I wrote about this before on HN as well [0][1][2]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42768018

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42767986

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763734

[monkeydust]

London and UK for that matter is great and seeding Startups...high quality universities, entrepreneurialism and attractive tax benefits for angels but for real growth capital it lags massively behind US and has forever.

The Kraken story is one to follow to see if this changes...https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news...

[3rodents]

"Freetrade built a profitable trading app, got acquired by IG Group for £160M after targeting a £700M valuation"

That is not an accurate recollection of history. Freetrade raised money at a £700 million valuation at the very top of the market when money was plentiful, then, when the money dried up, and they were forced to go from losing money to making money, and they cut all advertising, they were able to just about scrape profitability. At the point of the acquisition, Freetrade either needed more investment to fund more advertising, or get acquired. After 10 years, a dozen rounds of fundraising and capital drying up, £160M is a good exit. Freetrade was significantly overvalued at £700 million.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/investing/article-142962...

[dukeyukey]

And also, IG Group is a British company, HQ'd in London, traded on the London Stock Exchange. "British stock trading company acquired by British stock trading company" is a pretty boring event.

[philipwhiuk]

There's an argument that some of these takeovers should have been blocked.

[dukeyukey]

> enabled by London’s shrinking public markets

That doesn't seem to be true?

[alephnerd]

It is - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-30/london-dr...

Edit: can't reply

The majority of IPOs in 2025 were in 4 markets - US, China, Hong Kong, India, and South Korea [0]. It's really hard to exit in the LSE currently, and this article is self congratulatory while ignoring major recent (past 2-3 years) mistakes that negatively impacted the entrepreneurship scene in the UK (eg. the revocation of funding for Tech Nation [1] and the ongoing leadership crisis at Monzo [2] which makes no one look good).

[0] - https://www.ey.com/en_pt/insights/ipo/trends

[1] - https://sifted.eu/articles/tech-nation-shutting-down

[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/3405c6f3-931b-4fe3-a169-a9665a132...

[dukeyukey]

I don't know Aakash Gupta so I can't say if he's lying or just didn't do his research, but I know the IPO figures he cited there are wrong, like very wrong, which puts everything else there in doubt.

Not to mention location of IPO not being all that important. But that's a whole separate thing.

[siquick]

In football we’d call the US “tap-in merchants”.