Sovereign AI @UKSovereignAI

The latest stop of the UK tour took us to Cardiff! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 It was incredible to meet with exceptional founders, researchers and investors in Wales, and to hear about their exciting plans for the future. Thank you to @TramshedTech for hosting us. Their start-up community is thriving and the ambition across the Welsh tech ecosystem is off the scale. A particular thank you to their co-founders, Mark John and Louise Harris MBE for hosting the evening, to Ben Shorrock, CEO at Tech Spark UK for his insights into how the Wales and the West regional partnership can work together in building a thriving ecosystem, and to the Isambard Bristol Centre for Supercomputing team. It was also hear to great from Talfan Evans, co-founder of Cursive – who Sovereign AI is proud to have backed with access to compute – who is an exemplar of the AI talent emerging from Wales. The message in the room was clear. Wales has the talent to create world-leading AI companies. Next stop, Manchester!

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

The Sovereign AI Tour continues! In July, our investment team will be visiting Manchester to meet with incredible founders and the local ecosystem. More dates coming soon...

@CallosumAI is hiring in London! We're building the infrastructure for heterogeneous compute - making many models, on many chips, behave as a single coherent, co-evolving system. Five MTS roles open across the AI infra stack. Link below!

Fantastic evening in Glasgow for the second stop on our May Tour. A huge thank you to everyone who joined us and to the many exceptional founders, researchers, operators and investors we had the chance to meet and learn from throughout the day. The ambition and technical depth across Scotland’s AI and deep tech ecosystem is incredible. A special thanks to @FilamentStac and the whole team at TheBeyond for organising such a brilliant event and for the continued work you’re doing to champion Scotland’s tech economy. A few themes from the evening that stood out strongly: • The UK’s AI future will be built across the whole country. • Scotland already possesses world-class sovereign capability across AI, deep tech, photonics, quantum and scientific research. • The next generation of globally significant AI companies can and should scale from here. From Glasgow’s deep technical research base to Edinburgh’s AI ecosystem and the enormous infrastructure opportunity emerging across North Lanarkshire, the foundations are here for something globally significant. There is extraordinary talent and ambition distributed right across Britain, and evenings like this are why these conversations matter.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

Capital, compute and a country behind you... Sov AI provides access to the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputers, enabling startups to train, test and deploy at scale, with allocations of up to 1 million GPU hours. • High-performance sovereign compute capacity based in the UK • Support for large-scale model training and deployment • Secure environments for sensitive and regulated workloads You can explore the full compute offer and apply here: sovereignai.gov.uk/compute-strate…

Over the last few months, AI founders have flagged to me the challenge of procurement: that it’s still too hard for British startups to sell to government. Two practical pieces of progress to report back! 🚀 1/ UK AI leader, @quantexa, has today been awarded a major £175m Decision Intelligence contract by the UK government at HMRC. Congratulations, @VishalMarria4 and team @quantexa 🇬🇧 quantexa.com/press/quantexa… 2/ We are in the final two days of consulting on our fast R&D procurement set up at @UKSovereignAI, so govt can move at the pace of the fastest customer in validating the best of British AI. Have your view here: find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/035079-… Lots more to do!

@goodwin_ml Congratulations Walter and the Fractile team 🚀

I am thrilled to share the news that Fractile's mission to build chips and systems that unlock the next generation of AI scaling has been bolstered, with a $220M funding round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, alongside some incredible backers old and new. AI inference is driving the defining infrastructure buildout of the 21st Century. We've written a bit about where we think capabilities must go, and how Fractile is working to bring this about: fractile.ai/news/fractile-… It has been a privilege working on one of the hardest but most rewarding technical challenges of our time for over three years, with the most brilliant, kind and driven people I could have ever hoped to work alongside. We are still just getting started. There is a lot to be done to deliver on our goals, but we are grateful to have the support of so many people in chasing these down every minute of every day. Thanks, all, for being part of the Fractile mission! 🚀 @fractile_ai

Yesterday, we kicked off our May tour in Newcastle at Atom bank! The event brought together founders, investors, students and ecosystem leaders from across the North East. A massive thank you @SunSoftCity and @NorthEast_CA for helping to organise. It was fantastic to connect with so many incredible founders building in the North East.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@demishassabis @Jameswise @maxjaderberg 🇬🇧

@HZoete …And we’re just getting started 🇬🇧 🚀

@matthewclifford 🇬🇧

@SebJohnsonUK @HZoete @GoogleDeepMind @demishassabis 🇬🇧

💥 Sovereign AI is backing @IsomorphicLabs 💥   Sovereign AI has invested in Isomorphic Labs. Led by Nobel Prize-winner and CEO Sir Demis Hassabis and President Max Jaderberg, Isomorphic is using frontier AI to transform drug discovery, ushering in a new era of biomedical breakthroughs.

sovereignai.gov.uk/post/suzanne-a…

🔔Announcement🔔 Suzanne Ashman, former General Partner at LocalGlobe and Latitude, is joining Sovereign AI as Managing Partner. Suzanne, who has spent a decade backing founders who have come to define a generation of British technology, from Tessian to Open Cosmos, is one of the most respected venture investors in the UK.

Watch the full video here: youtu.be/BvGwrz87XkE?si…

We're here in listening mode... Watch @alexgkendall and @MeryemArik9 discuss how Sovereign AI can be the best partners for AI startups with @KanishkaNarayan.

Here's my second quarterly update as Chair of Sovereign AI, now that I'm 6 months into the role. Since the last update we have: - formally launched the fund 🥳 - completed our first equity investments 💷 - set up our investment process, legal structure and hired more leadership 👩‍💼 - set out our investment criteria 📖 The response has been amazing. 130+ applications for compute access (60M+ GPU hours of demand), close to 100 direct applications for equity funding. Already investing in critical areas of AI, alongside the worlds best VCs. My goals for the next quarter: - more investments, with 6 approaching IC in coming weeks 💷 - the next procurement programme 📜 - deeper research collaborations 🔬 - and a UK tour 🇬🇧 We're also hiring two Investment Partners. You can find full details and read the report in the link below, and find live updates on applications and jobs on our website. Huge thanks to everyone who has supported us so far!

@SunSoftCity, @NorthEast_CA, @FilamentStac, @TramshedCF

Sovereign AI is going on tour! Throughout May our investment team will be heading to locations across the country to connect with incredible founders and the local ecosystem. We'll be announcing more locations soon! 👀