Losing Depop to US ownership makes the British tech sector look secondhand

The fashion resale app and its young users represents the likely future of retail: more online, more sustainable, and more social

Depop, the fashion resale app, has joined fellow British tech companies such as Arm Holdings and DeepMind in heading to a deep pool of investment outside its homeland.

London-based Depop's acquisition by Brooklyn-based Etsy for $1.6bn (1.1bn) last week came just days after Oxford-based WaveOptics, a maker of displays used in augmented-reality glasses, was bought up by the Santa Monica-headquartered owner of Snapchat for $500m.