TL;DR

Quantexa, the British company whose software helps banks and government bodies spot fraud and financial crime, is considering a multibillion-pound flotation in either London or New York. Chief executive Vishal Marria told Reuters the firm has been ready since January but has fixed no date, and could stay private. Separately, backer Warburg Pincus is exploring a sale of its 9-10% holding.

The venue question

“We can list in the UK or the U.S., or both,” Marria said. He was candid about why New York appeals: capital in far greater depth, plus the prospect of a richer valuation than London would award.

That is the sentence the London Stock Exchange has been hearing for years. Britain has already rewritten its listing rules to stem the outflow, and Peel Hunt’s head of research, Charles Hall, argued the pitch has to be commercial rather than patriotic. Companies are mobile, he said, and their investors and boards will push for whichever venue suits the company — so London has to be “compelling” rather than rely “on home-grown sentiment”.

A live test of buy-British procurement

Founded in 2016, Quantexa sells into banks, hospitals and government bodies. It signed a £175m contract with HMRC earlier this year to pull internal and external data together for fraud and error detection, and it is bidding for the NHS single patient record programme — the system meant to let staff see a patient’s history in one place.

That puts it directly in the argument over whether public bodies should favour domestic suppliers over American ones such as Palantir, whose platform the NHS already uses. In July the prime minister, Andy Burnham, argued that procurement ought to back British industry. Marria, notably, declined the easy win. Sovereignty, he argued, is less about where a supplier is headquartered than whether the customer keeps ownership of its data and can move it when a contract ends.

Looking forward

Warburg Pincus has hired Citigroup to weigh options for its stake, with an auction expected later this year, though sources cautioned no deal is certain. Other holders may sell alongside it. Quantexa was valued at roughly £2bn ($2.6bn) last year on a £137m ($175m) Series F led by Teachers’ Venture Growth; Warburg first backed it in 2021, leading a £120m ($153m) round. UK public bodies have signed around £5bn of AI contracts since 2018, so the state is buying at scale — the open question is whether the companies it buys from end up listed in London or priced in dollars.