AI startups now lead the UK venture scene, attracting about 74% of the $18.3 billion invested in UK startups during the first half of 2026. They also account for roughly 40% of all European AI funding in that time, according to PitchBook.
Tech Funding News asked top UK and European investors which UK AI companies they are watching right now. Their picks are listed below in alphabetical order.
Airspeed
Founders: Adam Liska, Devang Agrawal
Founding year: 2022
Total raised: $30.58M
Nominated by: Adam French, partner at Antler
Sales reps often juggle several live conversations at once, which makes it hard to remember key details over time. Airspeed records every sales conversation on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and, since April 2026, in-person meetings.
It organises these talks using frameworks such as MEDDPICC, SPICED, and BANT, then writes the results directly into Salesforce and HubSpot. Its AI agents use this information to draft pre-call briefs and follow-ups, spot deals that are stalling, and notice when key contacts leave before the sales rep does.
The startup raised a Series A round led by DN Capital, with Atlassian Ventures, Vi Partners, FJ Labs, and Framework Venture Partners also participating. PitchBook estimates this round at $25 million, following a $5.6 million seed round in 2023, bringing total funding to $30.58 million.
With autonomous AI sales reps like 11x and Artisan losing credibility, Adam French, partner at Antler, believes Airspeed’s move from a copilot to an execution tool comes at the right time. He credits the founders’ research on language model obsolescence for this shift and points to fourfold revenue growth and a doubled team as proof of their success.
Ankar
Founders: Wiem Gharbi, Tamar Gomez
Founding year: 2023
Total raised: $24.17M
Nominated by: Sam Nasrolahi, principal at InMotion Ventures
Wiem Gharbi and Tamar Gomez met while working at Palantir. One built machine learning applications, and the other was a development strategist. They both noticed how long it takes to turn an invention into a protected patent.
Ankar is their solution. It uses domain-specific AI to help with the intellectual property process and connects corporate R&D teams with the law firms they need. After building a presence in this area, the company is now working on what it calls an AI-native operating system for corporate innovation.
Ankar’s total funding exceeded $24 million after a $20 million Series A-plus debt round led by Atomico in November 2025. Index Ventures increased its stake alongside Norrsken VC and Daphni, following a $4 million seed round in May 2025.
“The team brings invaluable enterprise AI and go-to-market experience from Palantir and Helsing,” said Sam Nasrolahi, principal at InMotion Ventures, calling it a rare combination of technical expertise and an established network in the field Ankar is tackling.
Auryx
Founders: Erika Bondareva, Kayla-Jade Butkow, Professor Cecilia Mascolo
Founding year: 2025
Total raised: $2.09M
Nominated by: Mahesh Shankar Santiapillai, investment manager, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures
Auryx doesn’t add another wearable device. Instead, it turns existing in-ear devices into health monitors by picking up heart and breathing signals from sound, not light or motion, like most wearables. This software-only method works with any in-ear microphone, so there’s no need for new hardware.
The female-led startup raised a $2 million seed round in April 2026, led by Celero Ventures, with EWOR, Playfair Capital, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Vento, and PurposeTech also participating.
Mahesh Shankar Santiapillai, investment manager at Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, describes sound as a data-rich yet underutilized medium compared to optical or motion sensors and believes that the software-only model, leveraging existing hardware, offers Auryx a highly capital-efficient path to scale.
Basecamp Research
Founders: Dr Oliver Vince, Dr Glen Gowers
Founding year: 2019
Total raised: $83.5M
Nominated by: Adrian Friederich, principal at FoodLabs
Dr Oliver Vince and Dr Glen Gowers founded Basecamp Research to address the lack of sufficient biological data. Rather than relying solely on public datasets, the company sends teams out to gather new genetic information directly from the field.
The UK startup raised $58.4 million in a Series B round, led by Singular, with participation from S32, redalpine, and Roche board member André Hoffmann. Basecamp has since taken on an undisclosed later-stage venture investment from NVIDIA’s NVentures.
“What sets Basecamp Research apart from other biotech companies is its unique approach to solving the biological data shortage,” Adrian Friederich, principal at FoodLabs, said, noting that while most AI companies build models using the same public datasets, Basecamp goes out into nature to capture entirely new genetic information.
BeyondMath
Founders: Alan Patterson, Darren Garvey
Founding year: 2022
Total raised: $28.67M
Nominated by: Sam Nasrolahi, principal at InMotion Ventures
BeyondMath tackles slow and expensive physics simulations in engineering. The company says its solution can be up to 1,000 times faster without losing accuracy. Its neural operator design removes the need for lots of pre-training or pre-processing, unlike older modeling methods.
Its latest seed round, which PitchBook records as an $18.5 million seed extension led by UP.Partners and Cambridge Innovation Capital, with InMotion Ventures, Insight Partners, and others participating. That round followed earlier seed financings in 2023 and 2024, bringing total funding to $28.67 million.
Sam Nasrolahi attributes BeyondMath’s strength to its team, describing them as highly technical, deeply specialised, and intensely focused on meeting end-customer needs.
DropCode
Founders: Elliot J. Medcalf, Max Barysevich, Peter J. Christopher
Founding year: 2024
Total raised: $2.07M
Nominated by: Adrian Friederich, principal at FoodLabs
Finding new enzymes usually means choosing between speed and cost. Screening can be quick but not very accurate, or slow and pricey.
DropCode uses tiny droplets, each about a million times smaller than a test tube, tagged with a special genetic-optical barcode. This lets them run 1,000 experiments per second without losing accuracy. Each droplet’s DNA is linked to its results in real time.
The startup raised $0.58 million in early-stage VC in November 2024, followed by a $1.49 million early-stage VC round on July 29, 2025, from J12 Ventures and FoodLabs. PitchBook records a post-money valuation of roughly $9.1 million for the July 2025 round and total funding of $2.07 million to date.
Adrian Friederich, principal at FoodLabs, identifies significant market potential in enzyme engineering for sustainable biomanufacturing, estimating the sector’s value at over $50 billion. He believes that developing improved enzymes could open opportunities in entirely new industries.
Edgify
Founder: Nadav Israel
Founding year: 2014
Total raised: $29.58M
Nominated by: Rajan Dosanjh, managing partner, Rank Ventures
Edgify uses a new method for retail loss prevention. Rather than sending video to the cloud, its computer vision works right on in-store devices. It identifies products and spots losses at self-checkout without sending any footage outside the store.
The platform includes a comprehensive MLOps system that trains, deploys, monitors, and retrains models across fleets of edge devices. It coordinates federated learning across thousands of endpoints to enable continuous improvement of the entire network.
Edgify’s total reached $29.58 million once a $9 million Series A-plus round led by Rank Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, closed in August 2026, was added to its earlier financing. PitchBook records an initial Series A of roughly $7.6 million led by Octopus Ventures in 2018 and a later-stage VC round of roughly $8.2 million in 2020 from Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Mangrove Capital Partners, Impulse VC, Octopus Investments, and Plug and Play Tech Center.
More than 8,000 devices are deployed across 12 countries. They achieve 99.9% recognition accuracy on fresh produce at a top-five UK grocer and reduce loss-prevention incidents from 60 per week to two at a US grocery chain.
Rajan Dosanjh, managing partner at Rank Ventures, cites Edgify’s market traction as evidence of its effectiveness in challenging retail environments. He describes Edgify as a rare AI company addressing complex technical problems with measurable commercial impact and highlights Zebra Technologies’ integration of Edgify into its checkout hardware as strong validation.
Fifth Dimension
Founders: Dr Kate Jarvis, Johnny Morris
Founding year: 2023
Total raised: $40.41M
Nominated by: Mina Mutafchieva, partner, HV
Fifth Dimension has built a specialised alternative to conventional AI tools for real-asset investors. Its decision and analytics platform, powered by an assistant called Ellie, is already in use at BXP, Realty Income, and Madison International Realty.
The company’s latest raise was a $30.5 million Series A led by HV in May 2026, following a $2.9 million pre-seed led by Seedcamp and Anthemis in September 2023 and a $6.8 million seed round led by Speedinvest in September 2024. Other investors include Prudence, Mercia, MMC, Anthemis Female Innovators Lab, and AFG Partners, bringing total funding to about $40.41 million.
Mina Mutafchieva, partner at HV, attributes Fifth Dimension’s strength to its founders, who are experienced real estate management professionals with extensive industry networks and a deep understanding of sector workflows and challenges.
Flok Health
Founders: Finn Stevenson, Ric da Silva
Founding year: 2022
Total raised: $16.68M
Nominated by: Lucia Polverino, associate, Playfair
Finn Stevenson and Ric da Silva started Flok Health to tackle a big problem: musculoskeletal conditions are the top cause of disability worldwide, and patients often wait a long time for their first physiotherapy appointment.
The platform, which they call the first AI-driven digital physiotherapy clinic approved for clinical use, replaces the initial clinician assessment with generative AI and real-time video simulation rather than pre-recorded exercise videos. The company holds a Class IIa medical device certification and is regulated by the Care Quality Commission.
The Cambridge-based startup raised a $14.4 million Series A in June 2026, led by AlbionVC, with Eka Ventures, Form Ventures, Mercia Ventures, and others also participating. PitchBook records an earlier Series A of roughly $2.4 million in November 2022 from Form Ventures and Eka Ventures, bringing total funding to $16.68 million.
Lucia Polverino, associate at Playfair, highlights Flok’s operational model, which offers a zero-waitlist, on-demand solution that directly addresses staff shortages and care backlogs for healthcare providers such as the National Health Service.
Inherent Labs
Founders: Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes, Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev
Founding year: 2026
Total raised: $50M
Nominated by: Andrea Guariglia, investor, Dawn Capital
Most AI labs focus on answering questions, but Inherent Labs wants to build a platform that figures out which questions matter most. Their platform, Faraday, is a general-purpose, inventive AI designed to accelerate research across scientific fields and eventually enable labs to operate independently. It includes self-improvement for people, hardware, and algorithms.
The company emerged from stealth in May 2026 with a reported $50 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA’s NVentures.
“There is no better team to deliver it,” Andrea Guariglia, investor at Dawn Capital, said of the founders’ shared background across DeepMind and Reka — foundation models, multi-agent systems, meta-learning, and a stint shaping White House AI policy.
Jiva.ai
Founders: Dr Manish Patel, Dr Chetan Kaher, Sarah D’Souza
Founding year: 2019
Total raised: $4.39M
Nominated by: Rajan Dosanjh, managing partner, Rank Ventures
More and more companies want to build their own AI solutions rather than use third-party providers. However, most current tools make them share their data, infrastructure, or intellectual property.
Jiva.ai is a zero-code exception, enabling both technical and non-technical users to build and deploy AI models and agents across healthcare, finance, insurance, and law while retaining full ownership. Finished models can then be listed on Jiva.ai’s own marketplace, and the company has patented a technique it calls model fusion, which combines AI models across knowledge domains.
The Cardiff-based startup has raised approximately $2.2 million in equity funding, including a $2.1 million late-stage VC round in November 2024 from undisclosed investors, in addition to earlier grants and accelerator-linked capital. PitchBook records total funding of around $4.39 million, and a $620,000 convertible-debt round is currently in progress.
Rajan Dosanjh‘s case for Jiva.ai rests on the bench strength behind it: most of the founding team hold PhDs, spanning AI and machine learning, quantum physics, molecular biology, and data science.
PageIndex
Founders: Mingtian Zhang, Yu Tang
Founding year: 2023
Total raised: $1.42M
Nominated by: DC Cahalane, venture partner and head of ecosystem, SVV.ai
PageIndex believes most retrieval-augmented AI systems perform worse when documents are split into separate, disconnected parts.
Developed by VectifyAI, the company indexes documents based on their underlying structure, preserving hierarchy, definitions, and cross-references essential for long, complex materials. This approach has earned its open-source project over 29,000 stars on GitHub.
PageIndex closed an early-stage VC round of roughly $1.42 million, led by Twin Path Ventures and AlbionVC.
DC Cahalane, venture partner and head of ecosystem at SVV.ai, backs the team as much as the product: a strong group of AI researchers, he said, with solid research track records and industry experience at major tech companies.
Remedy Legal
Founders: Michael Stresing, Miles Covers
Founding year: 2025
Total raised: $0.28M
Nominated by: Adam French, partner at Antler
Michael Stresing and Miles Covers started Remedy Legal to help close the justice gap. They saw that most renters in landlord disputes can’t afford a lawyer.sentation.
The platform gives them a free, instant assessment of disputes over deposits, disrepair, eviction, and rent repayment orders, automatically pulling evidence from sources such as council licensing registers, the Deposit Protection Service and HM Land Registry, then building a case with human legal experts reviewing and handling handovers to partner law firms where needed. The company has supported more than 500 renters to date.
PitchBook records a $280,000 pre-seed round raised from Antler in November 2025. Recent reporting points to a roughly $2 million raise in progress, backed by angels including Chris Adelsbach OBE and Dan Garrett, as the company works toward approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Adam French, partner at Antler, attributes Remedy Legal’s strength to its founders: Michael Stresing brings a decade of legal-tech experience from SeedLegals, while Miles Covers offers founder experience at Revenir, a Y Combinator alumnus, as well as roles at OakNorth and PwC.
Rogue Cortex
Founder: Arnaud Thiercelin
Founding year: 2026
Total raised: N/A
Nominated by: Adam Chirkowski, partner, AlbionVC
While defence and industrial robotics are catching up with consumer robotics, most of the tools that support them are still lacking. Rogue Cortex is working to fill this gap by building a Physical AI infrastructure and developer tools for autonomous and remote systems used in defence, industry, and commercial settings.
The company is so new that its funding has not been publicly disclosed; its most recent public activity is a May 2026 partnership with UAS Nexus on a modular FPV drone kit.
Adam Chirkowski, partner at AlbionVC, emphasised founder-market fit, noting that Thiercelin’s deep domain expertise enabled him to identify enterprise robotics as underserved compared to the more saturated consumer market.
Runware
Founders: Flaviu Rădulescu, Ioana Hreninciuc
Founding year: 2023
Total raised: $70.55M
Nominated by: Andrea Guariglia, investor, Dawn Capital
Inference is a key but often overlooked part of AI, where costs can add up. Runware has built a single API that supports hundreds of image, video, and audio models, managing and improving the inference infrastructure from the hardware up.
TFN first covered Runware in September 2025 and again in December 2025, when it reported a $50 million Series A led by Dawn Capital, with Comcast Ventures, Insight Partners, a16z Speedrun, and Speedinvest also participating.
PitchBook records that round at $50 million, valuing the company at $310 million pre-money and $360 million post-money, and earlier financings including a $3 million pre-seed in October 2024 and a $17.55 million seed in September 2025, bringing total funding to $70.55 million.
Andrea Guariglia, investor at Dawn Capital, describes Runware’s advantage as operational. He notes that co-founders Rădulescu and Hreninciuc have extensive experience building and selling hardware and software to major global enterprises, positioning them well to lead in an infrastructure-driven category.
Sqwish
Founders: Ushnish Sengupta, Federica Freddi
Founding year: 2024
Total raised: $0.62M
Nominated by: Mahesh Shankar Santiapillai, investment manager, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures
Sqwish responds to the move in AI investment from quantity to quality by offering an outcome-based optimization layer for production AI systems. It adjusts these systems based on real business KPIs, learning from actual user and business feedback instead of just proxy metrics.
PitchBook currently records about $0.62 million in completed funding, consisting of a $570,000 early-stage VC round plus a $53,000 grant.
Mahesh Shankar Santiapillai noted that Sqwish distinguished itself in Cambridge Enterprise’s Founders at the University of Cambridge START incubator program. He added that the broader industry shift from maximizing token usage to focusing on measurable ROI aligns with the co-founders’ demonstrated ability to build and bootstrap effectively.
tem
Founders: Joe McDonald, Jason Stocks, Bartlomiej Szostek, Ross Mackay
Founding year: 2021
Total raised: $90.65M
Nominated by: Adam Chirkowski, partner, AlbionVC
tem is redesigning the transaction system underlying energy billing by adding AI to pricing, trading, and settlement. More than 2,600 UK business customers have signed up, drawn by the chance to get bills up to 30% lower than the national average.
Its Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Hitachi Ventures, Voyager Ventures, Schroders Capital, and Allianz also participating, on top of a $14 million Series A led by Atomico in July 2025, bringing total funding to $90.65 million, as per PitchBook.
Adam Chirkowski, partner at AlbionVC, highlighted the team’s rare combination of deep domain expertise, startup experience, and technical capability within the enethat rgy technology sector.
Valarian
Founders: Max Buchan, Josh McLaughlin
Founding year: 2019
Total raised: $71.8M
Nominated by: Mina Mutafchieva, partner, HV
Max Buchan, who used to work in cryptocurrency, and Josh McLaughlin, a former US Army Special Forces officer with over ten years at Palantir, co-founded Valarian (formerly Worldr). They believe real sovereignty means owning your own infrastructure instead of depending on external cloud services.
The company builds secure, sovereign AI capabilities aimed at national and corporate resilience, rooted in a security-first, infrastructure-driven approach shaped by its work in highly sensitive use cases.
TFN reported in July 2026 that Valarian raised a $50 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates, its first defence and dual-use investment in Europe. PitchBook records prior seed and Series 1 seed rounds totalling over $20 million from investors including Molten Ventures, IQ Capital Partners, Playfair Capital, Founders Factory, and others, bringing total funding to $71.8 million.
Mina Mutafchieva, partner at HV, stated that Valarian’s advantage lies in both trust and technology. Its experience with highly sensitive use cases, combined with a security-first, infrastructure-driven approach, provides a competitive edge.
Wassist
Founder: Josh Warwick
Founding year: 2025
Total raised: $1.1M
Nominated by: Lucia Polverino, associate, Playfair
Small merchants know their customers use WhatsApp, but most don’t have the tech skills to build on the platform. Wassist solves this by providing ready-made templates for sales, support, and marketing, plus an agent trained from the start on the merchant’s brand, products, and policies. The agent handles things like product recommendations and sizing questions and brings in a human when needed.
Wassist raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round led by Playfair Capital, with Octopus Ventures and Ventures Together also participating, alongside angels including former Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.
Lucia Polverino, associate at Playfair, observed that recent developments, including WhatsApp’s Business API expansion, reduced LLM costs, and Meta’s decision to eliminate service conversation fees, have created favorable conditions for Wassist.
She highlighted WhatsApp’s status as the primary online communication tool for 65% of UK adults and its widespread use for commerce in Spain and Italy. She also cited founder Josh Warwick’s computer science background and three years of experience building WhatsApp as key factors in her support.
Xylo
Founders: Habs Kim, Dermot O’Riordan
Founding year: 2024
Total raised: $4.2M
Nominated by: DC Cahalane, venture partner and head of ecosystem, SVV.ai
Delays in planning decisions can stop housing projects, business growth, or even whole streets. Xylo creates AI agents to speed up local authority application processing, based on over 300 hours of work with planning officers. Leeds City Council was an early design partner.
The company raised a $3.6 million pre-seed round led by CapitalT, with Common Magic, Sure Valley Ventures, Tiny VC, and Endurance Ventures also participating.
DC Cahalane, venture partner and head of ecosystem at SVV.ai, attributes Xylo’s success to the team’s combination of engineering expertise from Cytora and Marshmallow and legal and operational experience from Hogan Lovells and Orrick.
He notes that this blend has shaped Xylo’s ground-up approach to planning workflows. Early results show councils processing 40% more applications per officer each month, with 83% of officers reporting improved accuracy.
