Category: 3. Business

London, 10 February 2026 – GP Bullhound is pleased to announce six senior promotions across the firm and extends its warmest congratulations to our newly promoted colleagues. These promotions reflect the depth of our senior leadership team and the long-term commitment our people bring to clients globally.

We are also delighted to welcome Greg Stucker as Director, San Francisco, further reinforcing our senior dealmaking capability and global platform.

Ale Casartelli – promoted to Partner
Ale joined GP Bullhound in 2011 as an Analyst and has grown into a trusted senior advisor across Business Software and Consumer Technology. With more than a decade of investment banking experience, he has led 30+ M&A and capital raising transactions for some of the most prominent global internet, software, and media businesses, including Spotify, Avito, Believe Digital, Jellyfish, Baltics Classified Group, and MiQ.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Alessandro worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London. He holds an MSc in Corporate Finance from ESADE Business School and a degree in Economics and Management from Bocconi University.

Simon Miremadi – promoted to Partner
Simon joined GP Bullhound in 2015 as an Analyst and has played a key role in building and deepening client relationships across Europe and the US, including time in our Berlin and San Francisco offices. Over his ten-year tenure at GP Bullhound, he has advised a range of high-profile clients including Urban Sports Club, Eversports, Motif, Signavio, 7NXT, Flightright, and Uberall.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Simon gained experience at MCF Corporate Finance, Woodside Capital Partners, and Deutsche Bank. He holds an MBA from California State University and a BSc in International Business from ESB Business School in Reutlingen.

Jaime Sendagorta – promoted to Managing Director

Jaime joined GP Bullhound in 2017 as an Associate and has developed into a senior leader across our Consumer Technology and Business Software practices. With 10+ years of experience in the technology industry, he has led numerous successful M&A and fundraising transactions, supporting founders and management teams through complex, high-stakes outcomes.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Jaime began his investment banking career at Credit Suisse in London (EMEA TMT). He holds a dual bachelor’s degree in Law and Business Administration & Management from ICADE, Madrid, and completed two study exchange placements, first at the University of San Diego and then at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Pierce Lewis-Oakes – promoted to Managing Director

Pierce began his GP Bullhound journey as an Intern in 2015, marking the start of a decade-plus career at the firm and a track record of consistently delivering for clients. He has closed 20+ transactions representing over US$3 billion of enterprise value and advises across consumer and enterprise software. Notable transactions include Flo Health’s US$230 million investment from General Atlantic, Falcon’s sale to Cision, and FATMAP’s sale to Strava.

Pierce holds a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University, where he was awarded a Presidential Academic Scholarship.

Gerry Kelliher – promoted to Director

Gerry joined GP Bullhound in 2021 and brings experience across investment banking and private equity. He started his career at Citi and most recently worked at Alliant Partners, a specialist technology investment bank, and Pantheon Ventures, a fund-of-funds focused on infrastructure and real assets. Gerry holds a BA in Finance and Economics from the University of Notre Dame.

Nansi Nistorova – promoted to Director

Nansi has extensive experience advising on mergers and acquisitions, growth capital raises, and restructurings. Since 2018, she has completed a double-digit number of technology transactions, supporting a diverse client base, from fast-growing VC/PE-backed companies and founder-led businesses to multinational companies.

Prior to joining GP Bullhound, Nansi worked in the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications (TMT) teams at STOUT and Stifel Europe (formerly ACXIT Capital Partners), advising clients across a wide range of strategic and financial transactions.

These promotions underscore our dedication to excellence and our strategic vision for the future. Congratulations to all our newly promoted team members.

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Insider Brief

• Researchers experimentally demonstrated deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication over 20.121 km of optical fiber, extending dense coding from laboratory-scale tests to metropolitan-scale distances.
• The work uses an improved continuous-variable quantum dense coding scheme that independently transmits entangled states and local oscillator beams to reduce fiber noise and prevent decoding with classical coherent states alone.
• Measurements show higher signal-to-noise ratios and increased channel capacity than classical communication across long fiber links, particularly at larger average photon numbers.
• Schematic of the experimental setup for continuous-variable entanglement-assisted quantum comumication. (Xiaolong Su et al.)

PRESS RELEASE — Entanglement-assisted quantum communication has substantial advantages in surpassing the power of classical communication by utilizing the entangled state. As a typical entanglement-assisted quantum communication encoding scheme, quantum dense coding enables two communication parties to enhance the channel capacity with the shared quantum entanglement. In continuous-variable quantum dense coding, the classical signals are encoded on both amplitude and phase quadratures of one entangled beam. Owing to the deterministic advantage in the generation and detection of continuous-variable entangled states, the combination of continuous-variable quantum dense coding enables the implementation of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication.

Since the first experimental demonstration of quantum dense coding with entangled photon pairs, it has been experimentally demonstrated in several physical systems, including optical system, nuclear magnetic resonance system, and atomic system. However, most demonstrations of entanglement-assisted quantum communication with dense coding still remain in proof-of-principle experiments. The implementation of quantum dense coding in practical fiber channels is of great significance for advancing the practicalization of quantum communication. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out research on entanglement-assisted quantum communication with quantum dense coding in fiber channels.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, a team of scientists, led by Professor Xiaolong Su from State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics Technologies and Devices, Institute of Opto-Electronics, Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, China and co-workers experimentally demonstrated the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication in fiber channels. Compared to previous proof-of-principle experiments, they extended the transmission distance of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication from meters to 20.121 km, which has potential applications in metropolitan quantum communication.

They proposed an improved continuous-variable dense coding scheme, where Alice (sender) adjusts the amplitude of the classical signals according to the transmission efficiency to ensure that the received signals can not be decoded by using the coherent state at Bob’s (receiver) station. Moreover, by transmitting entangled state and local oscillator beam independently to reduce the excess noise in the fiber channel, they experimentally demonstrated the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication in 20-km fiber channels. They introduced the details of the experiment as follows.

“The experimental setup is illustrated in Fig. 1. At Alice’s station, the generated Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entangled state is first coupled into the fiber. Subsequently, Alice modulates two classical signals on an ancilla coherent beam simultaneously by the fiber amplitude and phase modulators, respectively, and then couples the modulated ancilla beam and one of the entangled states on a 99:1 fiber beamsplitter to realize the encoding process. Finally, Alice transmits the entangled states to Bob through two independent fiber channels. At Bob’s station, he couples the two  entangled beams on a 50:50 beam splitter. The amplitude and phase quadratures of the output beams from the 50:50 beam splitter are simultaneously measured by two homodyne detectors to realize the decoding process”.

“We encode 10 weak classical signals with different frequencies, including 5 amplitude signals and 5 phase signals, by applying the frequency division multiplexing technique as shown in Fig. 2a. With the help of the continuous-variable quantum entanglement, we successfully decode the 10 weak classical signals simultaneously, as shown in Fig. 2b and 2c. Since the correlated noises of the entangled state are lower than the corresponding shot noise limit (vacuum noise), the noise background of entanglement-assisted quantum communication is decreased, the weak classical signals that submerged in the vacuum noise are decoded, thereby the signal-to-noise ratios are increased.”

 “The channel capacity of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication is shown in Fig. 3. The results show that the channel capacity of entanglement-assisted quantum communication with improved signals and entanglement-assisted quantum communication is increased compared to classical communication using coherent state. The channel capacities of entanglement-assisted quantum communication based on quantum dense coding at the different transmission distances are higher than that of classical communication with coherent state in the case of large average photon number.” they added.

Europeans are booking fewer trips to the US, Europe’s biggest travel operator has said, as appetite for long-haul travel wanes and concerns linger around Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Tui, which receives most of its bookings from customers in Europe, has seen “significantly lower demand” for travel into the US, according to its chief executive, Sebastian Ebel.

“What we do see is growing business to the Emirates and Asia,” he said. “We also see European demand to the Caribbean, which – due to capacity – had not been the biggest priority in the past, but there we see now potential again to grow.”

It comes amid signs that demand for long-haul travel across the Atlantic is waning.

A report by the European Travel Commission, which surveyed travellers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea and the US, found 42% of long-haul travellers were considering a trip to Europe this year, down from 45% last year. In the US, only 34% intended to travel to Europe, down from 37%.

In Europe, several countries have issued advisories about travel to the US owing to stricter border scrutiny, the detention of some visitors and protests over the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Since Trump took office, reports have emerged from US border of tourists being detained and interrogated, people with work permits sent to ICE detention centres and people being wrongly deported.

Overseas visits to the US from western Europe were down 4% in December compared with the same month last year, according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office.

Last year, Ebel said Tui had seen a “significant decline” in travel to the US, owing to a multitude of factors including “the atmosphere, what you hear from border control”.

While demand for US holidays has been weaker, Tui hailed its best first quarter in just over a decade.

The German travel operator, which is headquartered in Hanover and employs about 67,000 people around the world, reported a 1% rise in revenue to €4.9bn (£4.3bn) in the quarter ending in December, and a 7.5% rise in operating profit to €72.9m.

Aarin Chiekrie, an analyst at the investment broker Hargreaves Lansdown, said much of the success came from its cruise business, where profits rose by more than 70%.

“Consumers continue to prioritise travel, which has seen Tui’s occupancy rates rise despite its fleet expansion,” he said. “All other business segments saw profitability improve over the period, except hotels and resorts, which suffered a double-digit decline due to losses resulting from the Jamaican hurricane, and the non-repeat of some one-off benefits last year.”

Shares in Tui, which is listed in Frankfurt, ticked up 0.4% in early trading on Tuesday. The stock has risen by about 10% in the past year.

Collaboration enables regulated institutions to deploy digital asset services using certified, customer-owned hardware within existing compliance frameworks

SINGAPORE, Feb. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fireblocks, the enterprise platform securing more than $5 trillion in digital asset transfers annually, today announced an expanded collaboration with Thales, a global leader in cybersecurity and trusted provider of Luna Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), to deliver institutional-grade digital asset security architecture for financial institutions.

The collaboration integrates Fireblocks’ digital asset platform with Thales’ Luna HSMs, enabling institutions to extend their existing certified hardware infrastructure into digital asset operations without re-architecting security models or compromising regulatory compliance.

The architecture supports a wide range of institutional use cases, including custody, trading, tokenization, and onchain settlement, while integrating with existing security, governance, and audit processes. Organizations can securely manage cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, security tokens, and tokenized real-world assets across major blockchain networks – with support for multiple elliptic curves enabling broader cross-chain coverage and deeper liquidity.

Unlike solutions that rely on opaque security models, Fireblocks provides banks and financial institutions with complete policy control and final authority over transactions – meeting regulatory expectations for accountability and clear governance. The joint solution maps security controls directly to compliance requirements through customer-owned Luna HSMs, multi-party computation (MPC), and cross-domain integrations that regulators understand and can assess for operational risk.

This control is operationalized through Fireblocks KeyLink, which ensures private keys or key shares are generated, stored, and operated entirely within customer-owned Luna HSMs. All cryptographic operations are performed inside institution-controlled infrastructure – Fireblocks cannot unilaterally sign transactions or move assets. Instead, the platform provides policy enforcement, orchestration, and enterprise-grade governance across hot, warm, and cold operating models.

Todd Moore, Vice President, Data Security Products at Thales, commented, “As digital assets reshape global finance, adoption will depend on a proven foundation of trust. Thales provides that foundation with Luna HSMs, protecting and controlling the cryptographic keys that underpin ownership and transaction authority. Combined with Fireblocks, we help institutions reduce key-exposure risk, strengthen governance, and move digital value with confidence across high-value digital ecosystems at scale.”

“As banks and financial institutions accelerate production deployments as well as proofs-of-concept, they need digital asset infrastructure that aligns with the same governance, audit, and risk principles that underpin traditional financial infrastructure,” said Adam Levine, SVP, Head of Corporate Development and Partnerships at Fireblocks. “By expanding our partnership with Thales, we’re enabling the deployment of digital asset services using customer-owned, certified hardware they already trust – without compromising on control, compliance, or operational integrity.”

Designed to handle institutional transaction volumes at scale, Fireblocks delivers the operational resilience and continuous availability that regulators require from mission-critical financial systems. With over 95 banks already using the platform in live environments, Fireblocks enables institutional digital asset adoption grounded in proven performance, regulatory alignment, and verifiable trust.

To find out more about how to secure digital asset private keys in customer-owned certified Luna HSMs, join the webinar on 3rd March 2026: https://bit.ly/4an5zSu

About Fireblocks

Fireblocks is the world’s most trusted digital asset infrastructure company, empowering organizations of all sizes to build, manage and grow their business on the blockchain. With the industry’s most scalable and secure platform, we streamline stablecoin payments, settlement, custody, tokenization, and trading operations enabling – everything from institutional finance to consumer-facing digital experiences across the largest ecosystem of banks, payment providers, stablecoin issuers, exchanges and custodians. Thousands of organizations – including Worldpay, BNY, Galaxy, and Revolut – trust Fireblocks to secure more than $10 trillion in digital asset transactions across 150+ blockchains. Learn more at fireblocks.com

About Thales

Thales (Euronext Paris: HO) is a global leader in advanced technologies for the Defence, Aerospace, and Cyber & Digital sectors. Its portfolio of innovative products and services addresses several major challenges: sovereignty, security, sustainability and inclusion.

The Group invests more than €4 billion per year in Research & Development in key areas, particularly for critical environments, such as Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum and cloud technologies.

Thales has more than 83,000 employees in 68 countries. In 2024, the Group generated sales of €20.6 billion.

SOURCE Fireblocks

By the end of the year, about a quarter of revenue at its Monks arm is expected to come from what it calls subscriptions — not in the Netflix sense but as a commercial model where, instead of selling hours, the agency sells ongoing access to a bundle that combines senior talent, AI workflows, agents and institutional knowledge for a steady, recurring fee.

Those agreements typically run for at least a year, with the heavy early lift of setting it all up folded into the subscription rather than billed as a one-off project, even as the tools and systems behind the work continue to improve over time.

From there, the deal works less like a fixed checklist of tasks and more like a service that gets better over time. As the AI system improves, the agency can produce more work or do it faster without having to rewrite the contract. Those efficiency gains don’t show up as fewer hours billed, they show up as more output inside the same fee.

As Monks’ co-founder and chief AI officer Wesley ter Haar put it, something that once delivered “50 of these [outputs] a month” might reach 70 as models get better and pipelines get smarter, creating ongoing value within the same commercial contract.

“With the hunger for compute about to explode do we then have to add pass through [costs], which in an ideal world, as an agency, you don’t want to do because it complicates the ability for a client to sign off on a contract if you have every variable as a pass through cost. Procurement teams hate that. So we try and wrap that up into our subscription model,” said ter Haar.

Clearly this stops well short of the outcome-based structure agency CEOs describe as the endgame. At most, subscriptions are a waypoint. The pressure behind them is more concrete. AI now handles work that used to take junior staff hours, while also introducing new, less visible costs in the form of model usage and compute. In that environment, charging by the hour fits the work less and less, pushing agencies toward models that reflect systems rather than time.

“Just like software, the subscription gets upgrades, which is why we say it’s ongoing,” said ter Haar.

Those upgrades play out across two interlocking tiers within the bundle.

On the human side, AI is absorbing more junior-heavy production, giving clients greater access to senior operators with more flexibility in how time is deployed. Hours allocated for one quarter can roll into the next, allowing the work to follow momentum rather than the calendar.

Alongside that sits the machine layer: repeatable marketing workflows powered by LLM-driven agents handling both standardized and bespoke tasks, supported by tiered knowledge bases that combine task logic, client data and broader industry intelligence. Together, these systems compress research and production time, even as most work remains under a people-in-the model rather than fully autonomous execution.

“The billable hour does not allow for any meaningful innovation, which clients understand,” said ter Haar. “They’re open to new models.”

So far one client has brought into it since last fall, and two more are expected to follow before the quarter closes.

“My goal for this year is to have about 25% of our revenue running in this model, and that is based on hopefully having three quite sizable clients signed up at the end of Q1 and then having a decent amount of new business that starts in that space,” said ter Haar.

What happens after that depends less on vision than mechanics. AI usage must remain economically manageable as tokens and inference costs fluctuate. Agencies have to decide whether to absorb or expose those tech expenses. Clients and procurement teams must accept a model that behaves differently from traditional scopes. At the same time, large legacy contracts inside organizations still built around billable hours have to unwind slowly enough for both sides to adjust. There’s also the structural risk in tying pricing too closely to raw AI consumption. The very technology meant to make work more efficiently can introduce volatility that neither side fully controls, complicating efforts to make the model feel predictable. 

“Token costs are falling while usage is exploding — it’s an unstable foundation,” said Robert Webster, founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU Marketing Solutions. “It would be wrong for an agency to try to arbitrate that situation. Yes, AI usage is going to be really important as are the subsequent inference costs that it generates but I fear getting stuck in a world where large parts of the industry charge an arbitrage on tokens.”

February 10, 2026

NTT DATA, Inc.

DUBAI – 10 February 2026 – NTT DATA, a global leader in AI, digital business and technology services, has acquired Zero&One, the first homegrown Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The acquisition significantly strengthens NTT DATA’s cloud capabilities and positions it to tap into the rapidly expanding Middle East cloud services market.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Dubai, Zero&One is a leading regional cloud consultancy. The company holds nine AWS competencies and was the first in the MENA to achieve AWS Generative AI Competency. In 2025, Zero&One was named AWS’s MENA Consulting Partner of the Year and received the Rising Star Partner of the Year and Design Partner of the Year awards at the EMEA level.

The acquisition supports NTT DATA’s regional growth ambitions as the Middle East cloud market enters a period of significant growth, e.g. Saudi Arabia’s cloud services market was valued at $4.77 billion last year and is expected to more than double by the early 2030s, with AWS set to open its first data center there in 2026.

“This acquisition enables us to deliver high-impact solutions and enhance the value we bring to organizations in the Middle East. Zero&One’s expertise strengthens our ability to deliver the speed, scale and technical depth clients need in today’s cloud-first environment,” said Burcak Soydan, Managing Director for the Middle East at NTT DATA.

“Joining NTT DATA is the natural next step in our growth journey,” said Ali El Kontar, CEO of Zero&One. “We’ve built our reputation on delivering world-class cloud expertise to organizations across the Middle East. As part of NTT DATA, we can now combine our regional knowledge and AWS specialization with global resources, expanded service offerings and the ability to support clients on an even larger scale. Our teams share a commitment to innovation and client success, making this an ideal partnership”

The acquisition enables NTT DATA to offer comprehensive cloud services to Middle East and African clients, including cloud migration, application modernization, cloud-native development, data analytics and AI solutions.