The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has a new interim chairman: former Amazon executive Doug Gurr (pictured above).
The announcement comes as the U.K. seeks to position itself as a pro-growth, pro-tech nation by cutting red-tape and bureaucracy, with artificial intelligence (AI) taking center stage. The country is also nearing the end of a long investigation into the domestic cloud services market that had Amazon firmly in the CMA’s crosshairs.
In its announcement on Tuesday, the government leaned into Gurr’s past at Amazon as a means to “boost growth and support the economy,” noting that he will “bring a wealth of experience” from his work in the sector.
“This Government has a clear Plan for Change — to boost growth for businesses and communities across the U.K.,” Jonathan Reynolds, the U.K.’s secretary of state for business and trade, said in a statement. “As we’ve set out, we want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets.”
Gurr joined Amazon’s U.K division in 2011, initially as VP of its “hardlines” division, which focused on products such as gardening and toys. He transitioned into the role of country manager for Amazon’s China business in 2014, before moving back to head up U.K. operations in 2016. Gurr left Amazon in 2020 to become the director of the Natural History Museum.
Outgoing chair Marcus Bokkerink, who has more of a consulting than commercial background, held his post for less than three years, a relatively short tenure as the position typically lasts up to five years. However, reports indicate that chancellor Rachel Reeves was underwhelmed following a meeting with various U.K. regulators last week, prompting a changing of the guard.
It’s worth noting that although Gurr’s appointment is on an interim basis, the CMA’s CEO Sarah Cardell was also initially appointed as interim CEO back in 2022 before she moved into the role permanently.
That’s not to say this is what will happen with Gurr, but it gives a clear indication about the type of person the government wants to see chairing the country’s antitrust regulator — a body currently investigating big tech firms for all manner of alleged contraventions.
Alex Haffner, competition partner at law firm Fladgate, says it’s no coincidence that Gurr’s appointment has come at a time when the U.K. is “banging the drum for its growth agenda.” He also highlighted that Gurr’s background is “unashamedly commercial” compared to his predecessor.
Over and above that, however, this appointment raises questions about how the CMA might approach its enforcement of rules around big tech across verticals.
“What stakeholders will now be assessing is how the new appointment translates into the CMA’s approach to enforcement,” Haffner said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Recent signs are that it has taken heed of criticism of previous decisions and is perhaps more willing to be flexible — the recent Vodafone / Three clearance decision being a case in point. However, the new Chair also takes on the role at a time when the CMA has taken on significant new powers under the Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Act, particularly in relation to its oversight of big tech, meaning the CMA will likely become more activist, albeit giving considerable attention as to how to enforce in a way which best stimulates competition and therefore economic growth.”
The Open Cloud Coalition, a Google-backed lobby group launched back in October to curry favor with European lawmakers, “congratulated” Gurr on his appointment as interim chair. However, Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition, urged the regulator not to lose sight of its ongoing investigation into the cloud services market, which counts Amazon as the runaway market leader.
“As the CMA’s cloud market investigation enters a critical phase, we urge the regulator to stay the course and take decisive action to create a fairer, more competitive cloud market that benefits businesses, consumers, and the wider digital economy,” Stewart said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “The cloud industry can only flourish when there is a level playing field, and as outlined in our position paper, meaningful intervention is essential to unlocking innovation and investment across the sector.”
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Indian fintech Jar has turned cash flow positive, an executive at the Tiger Global-backed startup confirmed on Wednesday, as it gears up to deepen its offerings.
The three-year-old startup, which offers its users the ability to start their savings and investment journey, achieved the milestone while still growing by more than 10 times last year, according to an investor note TechCrunch has reviewed.
The profitability push comes as many fast-growing Indian startups are improving their financials and paring down expenses to become IPO-ready.
Jar has expanded its offerings in the past year and a half, adding lending and online jewelry sales to its business. Its jewelry business, called Nek, is doing an annualized sales of about $13 million annually, according to the investor note.
The new offerings come at a time when the Bengaluru-headquartered startup is in talks to raise as much as $50 million in a new round of funding, according to Indian newspaper Economic Times. Jar declined to comment on the fundraising talks.
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Vertice has made a name for itself over the years in the crowded world of expenditure management by focusing on applying AI to optimize an area where businesses are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars annually: software and cloud spend.
The London-based startup’s business has grown 13x in the three years since its inception (similar how fast software spend has increased), and it has now raised $50 million in new funding to expand its vision.
“[Vertice] is designed to standardize companies’ processes around how they buy anything, not just software and cloud,” its CEO and co-founder Roy Tuvey (pictured above, told TechCrunch. “A lot of companies today have disparate solutions, different silos that they look at, and procurement teams are generally under a lot of pressure to deliver savings and efficiencies. They don’t have amazing technology today. So we’ve brought it all together in a unified and simplified platform.”
Lakestar, a new investor in the company, is leading this Series C round. Perpetual Growth and CF Private Equity, as well as previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and 83North (which co-led Vertice’s Series B almost exactly a year ago) are also participating.
The startup has now raised around $100 million in total, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Tuvey confirmed that this Series C was an up-round, valuing the company higher than the “several hundred millions” it was pegged at 12 months ago.
The size of Vertice’s customers has grown, too: Its clientele now number in the hundreds across Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific, including the likes of chip giant ASML, Euronext, Grant Thornton, and banking behemoth Santander.
For some more context, Vertice’s founders have a strong history of entrepreneurship: Roy and his brother Eldar previously founded two security startups, ScanSafe, which they sold to Cisco in 2009 for $200 million; and Wandera, which was acquired by Jamf for $400 million in 2021.
Gartner predicts that spending on data centers in 2025 (thanks to cloud and AI), software, related IT and communication services will increase by more than 9% to just under $5 trillion, so it isn’t surprising to see Vertice working in a crowded part of the enterprise market.
Its competitors include a plethora of platforms that offer varying levels of services like product recommendations, pricing, side-by-side feature comparisons, and more. These include Spendbase, Spendesk, Gartner and G2.
Vertice’s point of differentiation, Tuvey said, is how it integrates with a business’s data to better understand what to suggest. Tapping into the same approaches that a cybersecurity firm might use to better understand activity in a network, Tuvey said Vertice uses AI and other tools to build a picture of what a company does, how much it spends typically, and what it might need or want to buy next.
In effect, the startup has built, along the lines of a large language model, a “large software procurement model,” where the parameters are not facts and insights, but software usage. The company claims it has ingested data on some $3.4 billion worth of SaaS and cloud expenditure, as well as benchmarking data on more than 16,000 software vendors (none of these have any financial relationship with Vertice, Tuvey confirmed).
Customers essentially use Vertice to speed up the process of buying and also to save money. The startup says that purchasing cycles can typically be cut in half, yielding savings between 20% and 30%.
“We ingest all the contract information through AI,” Tuvey said, adding that it uses the tech to build co-pilots to help with purchasing, automating work that finance teams might have to do manually before. “We surface benchmark pricing insights and analytics that they need at the point of purchase. AI is really interesting when it comes to procurement orchestration, because you can learn where the company has bottlenecks in their processes.”
That, in turn, helps Vertice understand how the wider business is working, he added.
“For example, if a company is always spending a long time with certain steps, for example to check pricing but also security compliance, we can see how to run them in parallel and save time,” he said. “And you can just imagine — the more and more apps you have, the AI can learn and make recommendations.”
It’s the Tuveys’ background, how they are applying it to procurement, and the resulting growth that has had investors knocking on the door, said Georgia Watson, the Lakestar partner leading this round. At the moment, expenditure is top of mind for companies looking to bring down operational costs — especially at startups given the constrictions they are facing around funding at the moment.
“Some of our portfolio companies are using Vertice,” Watson said, citing the pressure to bring down software expenditure. “That’s been a conversation we’ve been having… and feedback was overwhelmingly positive,” she noted, adding that Lakestar had been trying to invest previously, and finally pulled it off this time around.
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Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long left iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering the caller information in real-time — a feature its Android users have enjoyed for some time. Today, that changes as the company is rolling out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to its iOS subscribers.
The company was able to implement the feature because Apple introduced Live Caller ID Lookup in iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to securely make a call to their server to get information about the caller. Notably, this is also the first major release from the Swedish company after the co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from the day-to-day operations in November 2024.
Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which only around 750,000 of them are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue is from iOS subscriptions. The company also gets a 5X conversation rate to its premium tier on iOS compared to Android as well as 80% higher revenue from an iPhone subscriber.
Considering the importance of the iPhone to Truecaller’s bottom line, the company continues to develop its iOS app.
In 2022, Truecaller relaunched the iOS app to focus on better spam detection, thanks to Apple allowing the app to store a larger set of numbers locally.
“It did improve the overall call identification. But that wasn’t enough because in countries like India, there is a huge calling activity, and not all this would be available in the offline database,” Truecaller Product Director Nakul Kabra told TechCrunch in an interview.
India presents other challenges for the company, as well, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly called CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, currently being rolled out by local telcos, could eventually emerge as a competitor to Truecaller.
Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that involved a step requiring interaction with Siri and also wasn’t real-time.
Until iOS 18’s release, Truecaller had to rely on a locally saved dictionary of limited phone numbers on iOS.
To enable the new feature, Truecaller built a new server architecture and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS, alongside its existing larger database for Android users. Apple’s Phone app makes encrypted requests to this database and gets encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to show the caller ID in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption,” as the computations use encrypted data instead of decrypting them first, while decryption happens on the client to display caller information if it matches with the data stored on the server.
Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller had built a way to sync two databases to keep the data synced between them.
“At the moment, there might be a bit of a delay because these requests get queued up, and the encryption that we do is very time-consuming — and very expensive… But it should not be more than a few hours,” he said.
TechCrunch tested live caller ID under Truecaller’s beta program last week and noticed that the feature does provide caller information in real-time in most cases, though it sometimes misses.
Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 a month, per individual, or $74.99/year. The company also offers its family plan on iOS starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a year.
Users can enable the Live Caller ID Lookup feature through iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.
On iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold over their number. Now, Truecaller is working on support for images to show up in the caller ID for its iOS users.
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President Trump on Tuesday pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the infamous dark web exchange Silk Road, which was best known as a once-thriving online marketplace for illegal drugs.
Trump announced the news in a Truth Social post, saying the pardon was in honor of Ulbricht’s mother and the Libertarian movement.
In 2015, a federal judge sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison for operating Silk Road under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts.” But last May, while on the 2024 campaign trail, Trump promised to commute Ulbricht’s life sentence while speaking to the Libertarian National Convention.
Ulbricht started Silk Road as a Libertarian experiment, and the party has been lobbying to exonerate Ulbricht of his crimes for years now. Within the Libertarian Party, many viewed Ulbricht’s life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
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