Sovereign wealth fund to invest £1bn

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is in advanced talks to invest £1bn

in UK’s Babylon Health, a digital health start-up used by the National Health Service.

The investment is part of a new funding round for the start-up that will give Babylon “unicorn” status. London-based Babylon founded in 2013 by Ali Parsa, a British-Iranian entrepreneur and banker, Babylon has developed a “chatbot” that checks the symptoms of patients used by the NHS and offers a service connection patients in south west London to doctors thorough video calls on smartphones.

The company which also has contracts in South Korea’s Samsung and China’s Tencent.

This investment will mark the latest tech venture by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment  Fund, the prime method through which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has attempted to diversify the oil-dependent country’s holdings, he also invested $45bn in Soft Bank’s tech fund which has made a series of investments into Uber, Tesla and Magic Lean the augmented-reality company. Bany;pm was valued at more than $200m in a fundraising in 2017. Its business has grown rapidly since and now employs more than 1000 staff.