The British equity market is shrinking

British startups are abandoning public stockmarkets and turning to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley venture capitalists for their investment needs.

Gousto has chosen funding from private rather than public markets

Who needs the stockmarket? British start-ups are increasingly turning to deep-pocketed Silicon Valley venture capitalists rather than public markets for their investment needs, say Peter Evans and Ben Woods in The Sunday Times. That has profound implications for retail investors.

Take recipe-box company Gousto, which is on track for £100m in sales this year. A business at the centre of the booming trends for healthy eating and home delivery would once have been a prime candidate for a public listing, yet founder Timo Boldt has no plans to float any time soon. "We were oversubscribed with our last funding round and it meant we could choose our investors," he says.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.