Construction is an industry worth $13 trillion globally, yet it remains one of the least profitable on earth. Margins of between 1 and 4 per cent are the norm, and the commercial fate of most projects is sealed long before a single foundation is poured. That uncomfortable truth has just attracted serious capital.

ProcurePro, an Australian-founded software business pitching itself as the first end-to-end procurement platform built specifically for construction, has closed an $11 million (US) funding round led by QIC Ventures, the venture arm of one of Australia’s largest sovereign wealth funds and a substantial infrastructure asset owner in its own right. The round values the six-year-old company at more than $80 million.

Existing backers Airtree and Glitch Capital followed on, and were joined on the cap table by French construction heavyweight Bouygues, which invested through its corporate venture vehicle managed by ISAI. The fresh capital will be funnelled into ProcurePro’s AI roadmap and an ambitious push into the United Kingdom, the Middle East and North America.

The thesis is straightforward, if uncomfortable for an industry not known for its appetite for change. By the time a contractor breaks ground, roughly 80 per cent of project costs have already been committed and the bulk of supply chain risk is baked in. Yet across the sector, that critical procurement stage is still largely run on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads and disconnected PDFs — a state of affairs that would be unrecognisable in almost any other industry handling sums of comparable size.

ProcurePro’s response is to pull the full procurement lifecycle, scheduling, tendering, bid analysis and subcontracting, into a single system designed to give commercial teams genuine oversight before pen hits paper. Over the past six years, the platform has been used on 6,000 construction projects worldwide, representing more than $90 billion in build value, and has handled in excess of 200,000 trade packages.

That accumulated dataset is now the company’s strategic moat. It underpins BidLevel AI, ProcurePro’s flagship tool for comparing complex subcontractor quotes, a job that has traditionally swallowed days or even weeks of commercial managers’ time, and which the platform claims to compress into minutes.

Alastair Blenkin, founder and chief executive of ProcurePro, said the raise opens the next chapter of the company’s international growth. “Construction firms are still managing their most critical commercial decisions and millions in spend via out-of-date and untrustworthy spreadsheets,” he said. “The lack of true oversight delays risk identification, which ultimately erodes margins. We built ProcurePro to bring structure, control and certainty to the commercial cockpit of construction firms.”

Blenkin is unsubtle about the prize. “After years of supporting procurement across thousands of projects, we now have a rich foundation of real-world procurement data. This funding allows us to invest further in AI, where we’ll enable construction firms to estimate new project costs backed by their historical purchasing data, rather than someone’s estimate, memory, or a finger in the wind.”

Nick Capell, investment director at QIC Ventures, framed the deal in industrial-policy terms. “Procurement sits upstream of construction spend, yet remains highly manual and weakly governed. It’s a globally relevant problem that remains unsolved,” he said. “With Queensland delivering a once-in-a-generation infrastructure programme ahead of the 2032 Olympics, innovations that improve construction productivity are critical.”

For Bouygues, the appeal is more operational. Marie-Luce Godinot, the group’s senior vice-president for innovation, sustainability and IT, said ProcurePro had already proved itself on live sites. “ProcurePro is one of the first technologies we have seen that brings greater control to the full procurement journey for contractors. It has been deployed successfully on some Bouygues projects, with usage progressively developing across several business units.”

For UK contractors and their SME subcontractor base, the more immediate consequence is staffing. ProcurePro plans to hire 100 people globally over the next two years across product, engineering and go-to-market roles, with its London office among those being scaled alongside Brisbane and Dubai. A first US base is also on the cards.

Whether the platform proves to be the productivity catalyst its backers describe will ultimately be decided on building sites rather than in pitch decks. But after years of construction being singled out as the laggard of the digital economy, the level of conviction now being shown by sovereign wealth, tier-one contractors and specialist venture investors suggests the sector’s spreadsheet era may finally be drawing to a close.

Read more:
ProcurePro lands $11m to drag construction’s $13 trillion supply chain out of the spreadsheet era

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Vauxhall, one of Britain’s oldest and best-loved motoring marques, is to fit Chinese-engineered components in its vehicles for the first time in its 122-year history, in a striking move designed to keep family motoring within reach of cash-strapped UK households.

Parent group Stellantis confirmed at the weekend that electric motors, battery packs and powertrain technology supplied by Hangzhou-based Leapmotor will sit at the heart of the new Vauxhall C-SUV, a mid-sized family vehicle pencilled in for showrooms in 2028. It marks a significant shift for a brand that has built motor cars in Luton since 1905 and whose Ellesmere Port plant remains a totemic part of British manufacturing.

The deal is the clearest signal yet that Europe’s legacy carmakers have concluded they can no longer fight the Chinese on their own. Stellantis, which already owns a €1.5bn (£1.3bn) stake in Leapmotor acquired in 2023, will also throw open the doors of its Spanish plants to its partner, ending an arrangement under which Leapmotor manufactured exclusively on home soil.

Antonio Filosa, chief executive of Stellantis, described the Chinese group as a “trusted peer” and pitched the tie-up as “a true win-win for both of us”. He added that the agreement was “expected to support production and advance localisation in Europe of world-class manufacturing of electric vehicles at affordable prices to meet customers’ real-world needs”.

That nod to “real-world” buyers will not be lost on investors. Earlier this year Stellantis publicly conceded it had taken its eye off the average motorist during an ill-judged dash into electric vehicles, a misstep that prompted a €22bn writedown in February after sales fell well short of forecasts.

The wider picture is bleak for European and American manufacturers. A wave of well-priced, well-equipped Chinese electric models has caught the West flat-footed, and more than one in four EVs now sold in the United Kingdom is built in China, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Western carmakers complain that the playing field is anything but level. Research by the Rhodium Group puts the per-car state subsidy enjoyed by Chinese brand BYD at $347 (£257), against just $39 for Volkswagen and nothing at all for Tesla. Faced with that gulf, alliances with Chinese rivals are fast becoming a survival strategy rather than a strategic option. Stellantis, having taken its initial Leapmotor stake in 2023, has since spun out a 51pc-owned joint venture, Leapmotor International, to push Chinese-designed models into Western markets.

Nissan, the Japanese carmaker with deep roots in Sunderland, is also understood to have held exploratory talks with China’s Chery, the group behind the Omoda and Jaecoo nameplates now appearing on British driveways.

For motorists, the hope is cheaper cars. For Whitehall, the picture is rather more complicated. Under British law, every new vehicle must carry an embedded SIM card capable of contacting the emergency services after a crash, relaying location data and allowing the occupants to speak directly to 999 operators. Critics warn that the same technology could, in theory, allow a manufacturer, or a hostile state, to harvest in-car data or even tap into onboard cameras. Chinese marques and their trade bodies have consistently maintained that their vehicles comply fully with British and European privacy rules.

Under the new arrangement, the Vauxhall C-SUV will roll off the lines in Zaragoza in northern Spain, with a sister Leapmotor model produced in Madrid. Vauxhall engineers are expected to take the lead on design, ride and handling, and interior comfort, in an effort to preserve the brand’s British character.

Zhu Jiangming, the founder and chief executive of Leapmotor, struck a confident note. “Our leading-edge technologies, combined with Stellantis’s global reach, deep regional roots and much-loved automotive brands, would make this a uniquely powerful partnership,” he said. “Our joint venture, Leapmotor International, has quickly shown its benefits for both partners and in less than three years has seen us launch our brand on five continents and significantly grow our international reach and reputation.”

Founded in 2015 and shipping its first car in 2019, Leapmotor is a comparative newcomer in an industry measured in centuries. For Vauxhall, which has watched its market share slip as Chinese rivals such as BYD, MG and Omoda eat into the family-car segment, the gamble is plain enough: borrow the technology, keep the badge, and hope British buyers care more about the price on the windscreen than the country code on the components beneath the bonnet.

Read more:
Vauxhall turns to China’s Leapmotor in bid to keep British motoring affordable

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The high street rebrand that nobody asked for is heading towards the rocks. TG Jones, the chain hatched from the bones of WH Smith’s 450-strong shop estate, is staring down the barrel of bailiff action after racking up millions of pounds in unpaid bills, with its private equity owner conceding that the business may run out of cash before the summer is out.

In a 214-page restructuring dossier circulated to creditors last week, Modella Capital, the buyout house that snapped up the high street arm of WH Smith earlier this year, disclosed that the retailer is sitting on £3.4m of unpaid business rates, a further £4m owed to suppliers and an £8.4m tax bill that HMRC has so far agreed to defer. Add it together and the chain is in the red by the best part of £16m before the lights have so much as flickered.

“In recent weeks, the business has started to receive a significant number of demand letters and summonses as a result of the non-payment of business rates arrears,” Modella admitted in the document. “Without funding to pay these outstanding business rates or the compromise of these amounts, the business is at risk of local authorities seeking to take enforcement action.”

In plain English, that means bailiffs at the door, either to seize stock from the shop floor or to lodge a winding-up petition against the company itself.

A name nobody recognises

The whole affair has the unmistakable whiff of a deal gone sour. When Modella bought the high street estate from WH Smith, which has decamped to focus on its lucrative travel division at airports and railway stations, it was forbidden from continuing to use the WH Smith fascia. The result was TG Jones, an invented name plastered above hundreds of shopfronts where one of Britain’s most familiar brands once sat.

Trading, predictably, has collapsed. One landlord, who asked not to be named, did not mince her words. “They’ve bought the business and rebranded it with a name that’s lost all the goodwill that went with it,” she said, describing the surviving estate as “a really below-par store portfolio that sells God knows what”. Footfall, she added bluntly, “fell off a cliff”.

She is not alone in her fury. Modella is now asking the landlords of more than 120 shops to accept three-year rent holidays, three years of receiving precisely nothing, while hundreds more are being told to swallow rent reductions of between 15 and 75 per cent. If they refuse, the company has warned, it will run out of cash by the end of June.

Westminster turns the heat up

The proposals have caused consternation in Westminster. Justin Madders, the former employment minister and a member of the Commons business and trade select committee, accused Modella of operating a “heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses” model.

“If workers lose jobs, councils lose revenue and the public is left carrying the cost,” he told The Telegraph. He reserved particular scorn for the licensing arrangements buried inside the restructuring plan, under which TG Jones is required to pay millions of pounds in fees to other parts of the Modella ownership structure for the right to use the very name it was forced to adopt.

“What sticks in the craw,” Mr Madders said, “is that while councils are left chasing unpaid business rates and HMRC is giving breathing space over millions in deferred tax liabilities, the company’s own restructuring documents show millions accruing in licensing fees payable within the wider ownership structure for use of the newly created TG Jones brand name.”

It is the sort of arrangement, common enough in private equity playbooks, that tends to look rather less defensible when councils across the country are being told to wait their turn.

‘Sucking the soul out of the high street’

For all the talk of brutal trading conditions on the British high street, retail analysts are unconvinced that TG Jones can shelter behind macroeconomic excuses. Stephen Springham, head of UK retail research at property consultancy Knight Frank, pointed out that books and stationery — the very heart of the WH Smith proposition — was “the best performing retail subcategory last year, bar none”.

“They can’t blame market conditions. It’s absolutely scandalous,” Mr Springham said, before delivering the most damning verdict the sector has heard in years. The takeover, he argued, was “probably the worst example we’ve ever seen of private equity sucking the soul out of the high street — the only one I would say was worse was BHS”.

The comparison with Sir Philip Green’s collapsed department store is not one any private equity sponsor wishes to invite.

150 closures and counting

Internally, the message from management is no less stark. Alex Willson, the chief executive parachuted in to run TG Jones, told staff last week to brace for the closure of as many as 150 shops as landlords activate break clauses requiring just 43 days’ notice. Redundancies will follow.

“We absolutely cannot carry on as we are or there will not be a viable business in the future,” Mr Willson warned employees.

Creditors will vote on the restructuring plan in late June, with a High Court hearing scheduled for 29 June to determine whether the proposals can be sanctioned. Teneo, the private equity-owned restructuring consultancy, is leading the process.

Several landlords are already plotting a rebellion. “The more proactive landlords, like us, will do everything they can to take them back and re-let them to someone else,” one told The Telegraph. “We’ll do better with other retailers.”

For SME suppliers and small landlords with single-shop exposures, the calculus is rather more brutal. They are owed real money by a business that has openly told them it cannot pay, sitting beneath an ownership structure that continues to extract licensing fees for a brand worth a fraction of what it replaced.

Modella declined to comment.

Read more:
TG Jones faces bailiff threat as WH Smith successor buckles under unpaid tax bills

The Ministry of Defence has handed £16.6m to Elon Musk’s Starlink over the past four years, with much of the bill underwriting Britain’s military support for Ukraine and keeping deployed personnel connected to home.

Figures quietly released by the department show that, despite mounting political tensions between Labour and the world’s richest man, Whitehall has steadily deepened its commercial relationship with the SpaceX-owned satellite operator. A significant share of the spending has covered the purchase of Starlink terminals donated to Kyiv, where the kit has proved indispensable in maintaining uninterrupted high-speed connectivity along the front line.

The remainder has been routed towards welfare and communications provision for British troops stationed in remote theatres. Last year, sailors aboard the carrier HMS Prince of Wales were reported to be trialling Starlink to stream television and keep in touch with families during long deployments, a quality-of-life upgrade the MoD is keen to extend across the fleet.

Ukraine has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022. The hardware has reached Kyiv through a patchwork of direct donations from SpaceX, US military aid packages and contributions from allies, with Poland the most prominent European supplier. On the battlefield, the terminals have become a critical piece of infrastructure, powering drone operations and underpinning command-and-control communications in conditions where traditional networks have collapsed.

For all the headlines, the MoD’s outlay on Starlink remains a rounding error against the wider military space budget. The Armed Forces’ principal orbital communications are still carried by the dedicated Skynet constellation, which is in line for a £6bn upgrade programme over the coming decade.

Yet the figures will reignite debate in Westminster over Britain’s reliance on a single billionaire whose politics are sharply at odds with the Government’s. Mr Musk declared in 2024 that “civil war” in Britain was inevitable, and in September that year addressed a London rally convened by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, calling on those present to demand the “dissolution of Parliament”. The intervention drew a furious response from ministers, with Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, telling the Tesla founder to “get the hell out of our politics and our country”.

Relations deteriorated further earlier this year when Mr Musk’s X platform was rocked by revelations that its Grok chatbot had circulated thousands of non-consensual sexualised images of women. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, described the images as “absolutely disgusting”, prompting X to disable the function. X and Grok have both sat under the SpaceX corporate umbrella since February, alongside Starlink itself — meaning every contract the MoD signs with the satellite arm ultimately flows back to the same parent group.

The numbers also expose how comprehensively Starlink has eclipsed its UK-backed rival. OneWeb, the satellite operator part-owned by the British taxpayer following its 2020 government-led rescue, has secured just £2m of MoD business since 2022, barely a tenth of the Musk haul. For an industry that ministers have repeatedly identified as strategically vital, the gulf raises uncomfortable questions about domestic capability and procurement strategy.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: “Starlink technology is not used for military operations and is primarily used by our hard-working personnel to stay connected with their loved ones when they’re in areas without regular internet access, for example on a warship. As the public would rightly expect, all spending is rigorously checked to ensure it delivers value for taxpayers’ money and spend on Starlink has significantly reduced in the last year.”

Read more:
MOD hands Musk’s Starlink £16m as Ukraine support drives satellite spend

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