The UK government just announced the first major allocation from its £500 million Sovereign AI Fund, and other startups it is supporting.
Governments are increasingly seeing AI as a central part of national security and want sovereign capacity within their own borders, including foundation models and data centres.
The UK has a rich history of AI research — it is the home of DeepMind, for one — and a growing pipeline of companies trying to commercialise that research. Self-driving car company Wayve, which is powered by a world model for physical AI, is one such example.
Startups often stumbled when it comes to scaling, however, with the lack of growth-stage capital across the whole of Europe hindering ambitions. To get around this, founders often head across the pond in search of deeper pockets.
In efforts to tackle the country’s brain drain and support the AI ecosystem, the UK launched its £500 million Sovereign AI Fund. The fund was officially announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her March Mais Lecture and is part of a £2.5 billion AI and quantum program.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology just announced the first batch of companies it is supporting. They span biological foundation models, physical AI, sovereign inference infrastructure, agentic AI, engineering biology, and AI for national security.
Only one — Callosum — received equity investment, though the amount was not disclosed. The other six will receive access to the AI Research Resource (AIRR) supercomputer network. The DSIT says the Sovereign AI Fund also has a right of first refusal on future investments for some of these companies. It is also in talks with 30 others about access to AIRR.
Martell Hardenberg, a partner at Antler whose portfolio includes Prima Mente, is one company gaining supercomputer access, tells TFN that this is a game-changer for AI startups with one key bottleneck: compute. “This directly accelerates their research roadmap,” he says of Prima Mente.
The cohort was selected through the fund’s open and competitive call and assessed for strategic relevance, technical quality, scaling potential, and material compute needs, per DSIT.
Of the seven companies announced, only two have female cofounders, according to PitchBook. Notably, only one is based outside London—in California.
The skew towards the capital raises questions over who can actually access support from the Sovereign AI Fund, according to Jamie Hardesty, who heads up tech ecosystem development at Sunderland Software City.
From his vantage point in North East England, he could name “close to 100 AI-native companies.” “We’ve a shared responsibility to recognise that sovereign capability doesn’t come from the capital’s concentration alone,” he adds.
Check out the seven companies below:
General and investment information comes from PitchBook unless stated otherwise.
Callosum
Year founded: 2024
Headquarters: London
Founders: Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg
Total VC raised: $10.3 million
Investors: Plural Platform, Bare Metal Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and angels
What it does: Callosum, founded by two Cambridge neuroscientists, is building AI infrastructure to allow different models to work together and across different hardware. The end goal is to make AI more accessible, efficient, and cheaper.
Callosum is the only company in the batch to receive an equity investment from the Sovereign AI Fund. The VC figure does not reflect this additional investment.
Prima Mente
Year founded: 2023
Headquarters: London
Founders: Hannah Madan, Ravi Solanki, and Jonathan Wan
Total VC raised: $1.4 million
Investors: Beyond Capital, Bluebirds Capital, Episode 1 Ventures, Antler, and Octopus Ventures
What it does: Prima Mente is building AI for neuroscience. Its platform uses genomic mapping and biological modelling to detect the signs of neurological disease — early. The aim is to help medical researchers and healthcare administrators to better understand and treat brain conditions.
Doubleword
Year founded: 2021
Headquarters: London
Founders: Meryem Arik, Jamie Dborin and Fergus Finn
Total VC raised: $26.9 million
Investors: Dawn Capital, K5 Global, Atomico, Octopus Ventures, and others
What it does: Doubleword has developed a platform to make AI inference, which is the term for actually putting AI to use, cheaper. It enables automated model deployment and performance monitoring across different hardware stacks, with the goal of making workloads more efficient without cloud or vendor lock-in.
Cosine
Year founded: 2022
Headquarters: London
Founders: Yang Li, Alistair Pullen, and Sam Stenner
Total VC raised: $6 million
Investors: Gaingels, Lakestar, Multimodal Ventures, and others
What it does: Cosine has developed an AI agent to replace software developers for startups which want to keep lean teams. The Y Combinator-backed company’s conversational agent, which it has named Genie, can solve bugs, build features, and refactor code, amongst other things.
Cursive
Year founded: 2025
Headquarters: London
Founders: Olivier Henaff and Talfan Evans
Total VC raised: Undisclosed
Investors: SuperSeed
What it does: Cursive, which is still in stealth mode, is developing generative technology designed to build the foundation models and generative infrastructure.
Odyssey
Year founded: 2023
Headquarters: Menlo Park, California
Founders: Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke
Total VC raised: $27 million
Investors: AWS Startups, DCVC, EQT Ventures, Samsung Next, and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia
What it does: AI research company Odyssey, founded by Brits, is developing world models that already have applications across robotics to gaming, education to defense.
It wants to create a “Chat-GPT moment” in its own corner of AI, and has stacked its team full of industry heavyweights to do so. It has made hires from DeepMind, OpenAI, ByteDance, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Wayve, and Luma.
Twig Bio
Year founded: 2022
Headquarters: London
Founders: James Allen, Satnam Surae, and Russell Tucker
Total VC raised: $3.79 million
Investors: Creative Destruction Lab, FoodHack, Zero Carbon Capital, Future Planet Capital, Gaingels, Seedcamp, and others
What it does: Twig is a biotechnology startup using automation and AI to make sustainable bioproducts such as palmitic acid, isoprene, and acetone, which are used in a range of products today.
It has three core components: a bio tool that creates the base ingredients, robots that handle and analyse bacteria, and AI that assesses the outputs of the other two stages and suggests ways to improve the overall outcome.
