Business process services firm Serco has issued its annual pre-Christmas year end trading update, which outlined improved profitability on declining revenues.
This equated to an expected revenue total of around £4.8 billion for 2024, that would represent a -2% decline on 2023’s £4.9 billion total.
-Half-year results from UK-based call centre payments specialist Eckoh showed declining revenues of -10% to £16.6m, with adjusted operating profits down a similar amount to £3.6m.
Over half of sales continue be generated in the US. Private investment firm Bridgepoint plans to make LSE-listed Eckoh private in a £169m deal, that was announced in October. Subject to shareholder approval, the acquisition is expected to be completed during Q1 2025.
-AI-driven search engine startup Perplexity has completed its fourth funding round this year, with the fledgling business now valued at an impressive $9 billion.
Led by Institutional Venture Partners, with the involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price, the latest round of funding raised an additional $500m. SoftBank and Jeff Bezos are among other backers of the California-headquartered company, which aims to leverage AI to challenge Google’s dominance in the search market.
-According to research from Dell’Oro Group, revenue for data accelerators, consisting of GPUs and custom accelerators, increased by 130% in 3Q 2024. The US hyperscalers - Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft - deployed over 5m AI training-capable accelerators in 2024.
“Demand for accelerators has been growing at a breakneck pace as the hyperscalers race to deploy infrastructure for the training and inference of large language models,” said Baron Fung, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group. “In addition to commercially available GPUs, the US hyperscalers are also increasing their deployment of AI infrastructure with custom accelerators.
“Often co-developed with chipmakers like Broadcom and Marvell, these custom solutions aim to boost performance efficiency, lower costs, and reduce dependency on Nvidia GPUs.”
-For Q125, Accenture reported that revenue increased by 8% year-on-year at constant currency to $17.7 billion. The GAAP operating margin of 16.7% for the period was flat against the adjusted Q124 performance.
The stronger than anticipated start to the current fiscal year has led the consulting and services firm to raise its full year guidance for top line constant currency growth to 4%-7%, from the 3%-6% estimate provided in September.
-Vultr, the privately-held cloud infrastructure company, has completed a growth financing at a $3.5 billion valuation, led by LuminArx Capital Management and AMD Ventures.
Vultr says it will use the new equity financing to support its accelerated global expansion in AI infrastructure and cloud computing, aimed at enterprises and AI innovators globally.
Founded in 2014 by David Aninowsky, and previously self-funded, Vultr currently has 32 cloud data centre regions across six continents.
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