Artificial Intelligence

UK Launches £500M AI Fund, Backs First 7 Startups

Avatar of Ivy Delaney
April 17, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The UK has launched a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund and quickly provided support to seven initial startups, a speed observers described as fast for a venture capital operation. All seven companies will gain access to crucial compute resources, but Callosum, founded by Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, is the sole recipient of direct equity investment from the fund. Five others, Prima Mente, Doubleword, Cosine, Cursive, and Odyssey, have signed “right of first refusal” deals, granting the fund the initial option to invest in future funding rounds. The fund, chaired by James Wise and headed by Joséphine Kant, also includes twig among its first cohort, indicating a strategy for long-term influence and rapid capital deployment within the UK’s artificial intelligence sector. Rob Reynolds, Madeleine Steggall, William Bushby, Andrew Crawford, Joseph Supple, Monica Dahiya, Thomas Wright, Pierre Nouailhetas-Baneth, Ivor Chipman and Matthew Nairne deserve recognition for establishing this initiative so quickly.

Chaired by James Wise and led by Joséphine Kant, the fund revealed its initial cohort at an event hosted by Wayve, allocating support to Callosum, Prima Mente, Doubleword, Cosine, Cursive, Odyssey, and twig. Liz Kendall announced the first seven companies, and Rob Reynolds, Madeleine Steggall, William Bushby, Andrew Crawford, Joseph Supple, Monica Dahiya, Thomas Wright, Pierre Nouailhetas-Baneth, Ivor Chipman and Matthew Nairne were congratulated for swiftly establishing the initiative, demonstrating a commitment to rapid capital deployment in the competitive AI sector. The fund’s quick action and unique investment structure suggest an effort to foster a thriving domestic AI ecosystem, and the selection of these seven companies represents a first step toward achieving that goal.

These agreements offer the fund a first option to invest in subsequent financing, indicating a long-term commitment beyond initial support. Liz Kendall announced the selected companies; Prima Mente’s team includes Hannah Madan, Ravi Solanki, and Jonathan Wan, while Doubleword is led by Meryem Arik, Jamie Dborin (PhD), and Fergus Finn, all of whom are expected to benefit from the fund’s backing. Rob Reynolds and his team deserve recognition for their quick work on this initiative.

The team has moved INSANELY fast for a VC, which is exactly what we need to see. VERY excited by this.

Rob Reynolds
Stay current

See today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals.

Tags:
AI Fund annealing quantum computers Startups
Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

Latest Posts by Ivy Delaney: