The BOARD Brief Issue 7: He wrote Britain's AI plan. Now he works for Anthropic.

Hello there

Welcome to the seventh edition of The BOARD Brief, board-level intelligence for European private enterprise. We spend the week tracking what moved. You spend five minutes getting up to speed.

This week the man who wrote Britain's AI plan joined the company that plan helped bring into British government; Nvidia backed a Spanish optical-switching startup, the latest piece in its quiet buildout of the infrastructure beneath its own chips; and CVC closed a $10 billion secondaries fund, nearly double its last one, as more investors bet on liquidity over exits.

Our newsletter community keeps growing. Welcome to our new subscribers from Barclays, Stillfront, Concentric, Kraken Technologies, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Leexi, Grupporeco, MergersCorp and many more European investors, CEOs and Non Executive Directors.

1. The man who wrote Britain's AI plan just joined Anthropic

Matt Clifford, the architect of the UK's AI Opportunities Action Plan and former AI adviser to both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, has joined Anthropic as Managing Director of International Affairs.

He will lead the company's engagement with governments across the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific and India.

Clifford will remain chair of ARIA, the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency, which funds moonshot science and technology projects with taxpayer money. He will step back from any matter involving Anthropic at ARIA.

Clifford wrote the AI Opportunities Action Plan in January 2025 and the government adopted all fifty of its recommendations. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Anthropic the following month, and in January this year selected Anthropic to build an AI assistant for GOV.UK, a project Anthropic described as helping to deliver the Action Plan.
 

Why it matters: The revolving door between government and Silicon Valley is now well established: Nick Clegg to Meta, Rishi Sunak to Microsoft and Anthropic, George Osborne to OpenAI. Clifford is different. He is not leaving government entirely. He is sitting simultaneously in a senior role at one of the world's most powerful AI companies and as chair of a government body that funds AI research.

Chi Onwurah, chair of the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee, called it a "clear conflict of interest" and asked the AI Minister to intervene.

• Clifford co-founded Entrepreneurs First, which has backed companies worth more than $20 billion combined, and remains its chair.
• Anthropic said its commercial relationship with ARIA is handled by a separate team.
• Anthropic is preparing for a flotation that could value it at $2 trillion.

2. Nvidia backs Spanish university spinout building AI data centre infrastructure

iPronics, a spinout from the Universitat Politècnica de València founded in 2019, has raised $125 million in a Series B co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital.

Nvidia, Bosch Ventures and the European Innovation Council Fund also participated.

The company builds optical circuit switching platforms for AI data centres, routing data as light rather than converting it to electrical signals at each switch. Every conversion costs time and energy. At AI training scale those costs compound. iPronics eliminates them.

Why it matters: Nvidia is backing the connectivity infrastructure that makes its own GPU clusters more scalable and energy efficient.

This week Nvidia confirmed it will acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, a deal it expects to close in the first half of 2027, buying the discovery and distribution layer that sits above its chips. Nvidia is systematically acquiring and backing the infrastructure layers that depend on its chips: from the platform where developers find models to the hardware that connects them inside data centres. Every strategic investment Nvidia makes reinforces demand for its own core product.

• iPronics has raised $177 million to date.
• Optical circuit switching was proven at scale inside Google's own AI supercomputers. A wave of startups is now bringing the same approach to the wider market.

3. CVC doubles its secondaries fund

CVC Secondary Partners has closed its sixth global secondaries fund at $10 billion, nearly double its previous fund of $5.8 billion raised in 2023 and almost four times the $2.7 billion raised in 2019.

More than 200 institutional investors participated, with approximately half the capital coming from investors new to the platform.

Why it matters: The secondaries market is growing fast, and CVC's fundraising trajectory tracks it. Demand is coming from both sides: LPs want liquidity from funds past their expected holding period, GPs want to hold their best assets longer without forcing exits at the wrong time.

Last month, Exponent raised €750 million through a continuation fund to extend its ownership of H&MV Engineering, an Irish electrical infrastructure company that grew 16x in six years. Rather than selling into a difficult market, Exponent restructured ownership: existing investors got liquidity, new investors got access, and the company kept building.

For boards under investor pressure to exit, that means more options, and less need to sell into a weak market.

• Rob Lucas, CEO of CVC: "Secondaries is an important and growing part of CVC's leading global private markets platform."
• CVC Secondary Partners now manages €20 billion in AUM across private equity and credit secondary funds.
• Global secondaries fundraising reached $140 billion last year, according to PitchBook.

A short update from BOARD

BOARD is not only board-level intelligence for European private enterprise. It is also a forum, held at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco from 22 to 24 March 2027. We have just announced the first speakers and the programme.

Over 200 European CEOs are confirmed and more than 500 are expected by March. In total, over 2,000 delegates are expected: CEOs, board directors and investors.

The programme runs across five content pillars: Investment, M&A and Raising Capital; AI and Technology; Risk, Security and Resilience; Governance, Accountability and Board Dynamics; and Strategy, Leadership and Human Capital. Three days of plenary sessions, panels, roundtables and curated one-to-one meetings.

Here are the first speakers to take the stage:

• James Caan CBE, Founder and Chairman of Hamilton Bradshaw Group
• Jean-Dominique Sénard, Chairman of Renault Group
• Mike Jatania, Co-Founder of Aurea Group and Executive Chairman and CEO of The Body Shop
• Tim Kohn, Technologist-in-Residence at Summit Partners
• Olga Megorskaya, Founder and CEO of Toloka
• Lubomila Jordanova, Group CEO of Diginex
• Steffan Peyer, Managing Director at Summit Partners

This is only the first wave. More names to come.

DATA POINT OF THE WEEK

Britain is the second least excited country in the world about AI

What's new: Ipsos asked 23,532 adults across 32 countries whether products and services using AI make them excited. The global average was 51 per cent. Great Britain came in at 29 per cent, ahead of only Canada at 26 per cent. France and the United States sat at 33 per cent, Germany at 37 per cent. China was highest at 83 per cent, followed by India at 79 per cent.

Why it matters: The gap is widening rather than closing. Germany and Great Britain recorded the largest falls in excitement of any country surveyed between 2025 and 2026, both down eight points, with France down seven. Nervousness runs the other way: 62 per cent in Great Britain and 64 per cent in the United States, against 40 per cent in China.

Boards rolling out AI into European workforces and customer bases are working in a market that is becoming more sceptical, not less. The question is no longer whether the technology works. It is whether the people expected to use it, and to buy from it, believe it will work for them.

(Source: Ipsos AI Monitor 2026, 32 countries, 23,532 adults, fielded 20 March to 3 April 2026)

Patrick Collison asked a German founder whether the stories about the difficulty of building a startup in Germany are exaggerated. The reply: "No, they’re understated."

The founder described spending a full day listening to a notary read a ninety-page investment contract aloud, a requirement under German law, and a bill of €30,000 for it. His second company was incorporated elsewhere. Torsten Reil, co-founder of Helsing, pushed back in the thread and called the response defeatist.

Collison co-chairs the Rhine Group with Mario Draghi, set up in August to turn Europe’s competitiveness problem into reform. This is the version of that problem a board actually meets.

• Mistral is set to close a €3 billion Series D at a valuation of roughly €20 billion, backed by the EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund, Samsung, Nvidia and ASML. Sifted reports the round is oversubscribed and capped. It comes a year after ASML led its €1.7 billion Series C at an €11.7 billion valuation.
• Uplift Ventures launched this week, a €100 million fund backed solely by German industrial group Jungheinrich to invest in deeptech startups across Europe and the US.
• PLD Space extended its Series C by €108 million, led again by Mitsubishi Electric, taking the round to €288 million and total funding to €488 million. It comes days after the European Space Agency awarded the Spanish company a €158.9 million contract under its European Launcher Challenge. COFIDES, Endeavor Catalyst and the Spain Oman Private Equity Fund, managed by MCH Private Equity, also participated.
• The UK opened its first procurement competitions under the £100 million Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme, covering healthcare, AI compute, defence and cybersecurity. Contracts run from £250,000 to £10 million, winners keep the intellectual property they develop, and the eligibility rules are written so that smaller firms are not shut out by turnover or track record thresholds. The first application deadline is 1 October.

Thank you for reading the seventh edition. Let us know what you think about the newsletter and what topics we should cover more. Reply to this email; we read every response.

If this was useful, forward it to a peer.

We will be back next week.