Callosum has secured $10.25 million in new funding to accelerate a radically different approach to AI infrastructure. The round was led by Plural, with key support from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). Angel investors, including Charlie Songhurst, Stan Boland and John Lazar, also participated.
The investment will help Callosum expand its London team, scale its software stack and secure the compute resources needed to build future-ready sovereign AI infrastructure. It also positions the company as a challenger to the current hardware-dominated ecosystem, where NVIDIA holds around 85% of the GPU market.
Founders rooted in Cambridge’s neuroscience and computing excellence
Callosum was created by Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, who met during their PhDs at Cambridge. Their academic work sits at the crossroads of brain science, computing and intelligent systems. Their research has been published in leading Nature journals, and their industry experience spans roles at Intel and collaborations with Google DeepMind.
Their scientific grounding shapes Callosum’s core belief. Intelligence shouldn’t be built by endlessly scaling a single model on identical chips. Instead, it should emerge from many specialised components working together, just like the brain.
A system where many models and chips work as one
Callosum is developing systems-level software that lets different AI models run collaboratively across diverse chip architectures. The platform treats compute as a dynamic, adaptable ecosystem rather than a homogeneous grid of GPUs.
Instead of forcing all tasks onto one type of hardware, Callosum orchestrates models and chips into a coordinated system that communicates, adapts and loads work where each component performs best. This breaks dependence on any single hardware provider and unlocks capabilities previously impossible on uniform systems.
The performance gains are already significant. In complex real-world tasks, such as autonomous computer use, Callosum’s system delivers 2x the accuracy, 7x the speed, and 4x the cost savings compared to monoculture GPU setups. This makes solving high-difficulty problems economically feasible at scale.
Our thoughts
Callosum’s architecture is designed to scale globally. It already integrates with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, allowing organisations to choose the best mix of compute environments and hardware types.
Support from ARIA is helping the company activate new capabilities inside mixed-chip data centres, strengthening the UK’s pathway to sovereign AI infrastructure while still enabling a multi-cloud global footprint.
Danyal Akarca, co-founder of Callosum, said: “Big labs are currently betting that one model will rule them all. We think that’s wrong and our work proves this. Nature shows that real intelligence emerges from many systems working together. We’ve brought together incredible talent to enable a paradigm shift in how we build intelligent systems to solve real-world problems, with the infrastructure to make that possible, on any chip, anywhere in the world.”
Jascha Achterberg, co-founder of Callosum, said: “Everyone assumed chip diversity was a disadvantage to be managed. We saw the opposite, that it’s an advantage to be exploited. We’re not optimising one algorithm on top of the existing stack. We’re using software to control all the levers across the entire system, extracting benefits from diversity that others dismiss. Plural understands this mission and we’re excited to build alongside them.”
Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural, said: “Danyal and Jascha have been published in several Nature journals and worked with some of the most prestigious AI and compute organisations in the world. Now they’ve built an incredible team to define and commercialise entirely new ground. Their vision for a multi-model, multi-chip future could be transformative and positions them to compete with the world’s biggest chip and model makers. These are serious founders tackling a serious mission, which is exactly what we look for at Plural.”
