- Tech Funding News and noa hosted founders, VCs and LPs at Fieldfisher’s London office for a breakfast on physical AI.
- Minimal CEO Patrick Bion said his 20-person team now outbuilds the 600-strong unit he led at Arrival, thanks to AI tooling.
- Minimal expects its first on-road autonomous vehicle in the UK within about 12 months.
London’s AI community gathered this week at Fieldfisher’s office for an intimate breakfast hosted by Tech Funding News and noa, Europe’s largest built world VC firm, backing the founders rebuilding the physical world across Europe and the US.
Breakfast began early in the morning under clear skies, with the London skyline stretching out beyond the windows, and the room quickly filled with founders, investors, and LPs, including representatives from JP Morgan, Brighteye Ventures, SFC Capital, Lightrock, and more.
The centrepiece was a fireside chat between TFN founder and Editor-in-Chief Akansha Dimri and Patrick Bion, CEO and co-founder of Minimal, a noa portfolio company building what it calls the first full-stack operator for moving goods in cities.
From Arrival to Minimal
Bion’s route to Minimal ran through Arrival, the electric vehicle maker that grew from 40 people to around 2,500 in roughly four years and was once valued at about $13B. There, he built and led a team of around 600, owning product strategy and delivery for customers including Amazon, UPS and Royal Mail.
“I grew very frustrated with a business that had capital and potential, and an inability to deliver on that. The way we move goods in the world is changing dramatically, but the systems we use to meet that demand have not changed in 100 years,” Bion said.
Minimal builds small autonomous vehicles and the software platform that runs them, then either sells them to operators or runs the fleets itself. Early deployments with operators including Royal Mail and Evri have shown the company can cut costs by around 50%, Bion said.
A capital-efficient funding path
Bion was candid about building hardware in the UK, where customers are large, slow-moving businesses with long sales cycles. Minimal’s answer was to raise from angels and keep the team very small.
“We raised about £1.5M in the first 18 months from angels, in a very capital-efficient way. That let us prove product traction and prove we had an edge,” Bion said. The company went on to close a £4.5M round with noa last year.
He also credited his co-founders: CTO Liam Still, an engineer whose background spans fighter jets, submarines and autonomous and electric vehicles, and Joe, whom Bion described as the company’s “disruptive floating force.”
Own the product, own the operation
Labour accounts for around 60% of the cost of moving goods, which makes autonomy the biggest prize. Minimal plans to run autonomous fleets for operators directly.
“Building physical AI needs two things: a genuine edge in the product, and owning the operation. If you don’t own the operations, the data flywheel back into your physical AI is always at the mercy of someone else,” Bion added.
On regulation, he said the UK is doing a pretty good job of setting a national framework for authorising autonomous vehicles, though it will always take longer than expected.
20 people doing the work of 600
The standout moment came when Dimri asked how much Minimal relies on generative AI.
“At Arrival, I led about 600 people, and my CTO led about 200. We are doing more work with 20 people than we were then,” Bion said. Mechanical engineers at Minimal now run agents overnight to generate 3D CAD, tolerance analysis and drawings, while internal tools flag field issues in Slack with a proposed fix already written.
He estimated AI has made software development 100x faster, electrical systems work 50x faster and mechanical engineering 10 to 20x faster. “It’s difficult for investors to see what that does to the strategy of a hardware business right now,” he added.
Europe’s edge, and its gap
Bion argued Europe should stop competing with China on China’s strengths and lean into its own: deep manufacturing capacity and engineering talent, much of it in automotive industries facing existential pressure. The missing piece is growth-stage capital.
“It’s relatively small cheques into lots of businesses. In physical AI, scaling takes longer, and that deployment gap is where you need capital,” he said.
On hiring, he said mission beats money. “Talent is smart enough to ask whether this business is solving the right thing and whether they trust the leadership. That carries more substance than £50,000 more in salary.”
What investors are looking for
For Izzy Dipple, Marketing and Community Manager at noa, which invests from seed to Series B across energy, infrastructure, real estate, manufacturing, resilience, and physical AI, the topic could not have been better timed.
Dipple said physical AI is core to noa’s focus and that “now is just the perfect time to be investing in this space.” Above all, she added, noa backs “a founder who’s got a lot of conviction and passion for what they do.”
Akhil Menon, founder of notnull VC, summed up the UK’s double-edged position: “The American market says let’s try this, and if we mess it up, it’s okay. In the UK, we’ve got to make sure it’s pitch perfect. But if you can crack the UK market, you can crack the world, because you comply with all the regulatory aspects.”
As the conversation spilled into networking over coffee, the message from the room was clear: Europe has the engineers, the factories and now the AI tools to build physical AI at speed. What it needs next is the capital and the customers to move just as fast.
TFN thanks noa and Fieldfisher for hosting.
