The funding follows the assembly of a coalition of major British institutions to co-design a domestic AI model.
"AI is the single most important technology of our generation. Enterprises are increasingly waking up to the risk of being wholly dependent on foreign providers for this technology. Vendor lock-in creates security risk, dependency risk, and cost escalation risks,"
The London startup secured capital from Atomico and strategic investors to expand internationally and develop advanced foundation models.
"The tectonic plates of the whole global economy are being reshaped by industrial manufacturing. Geopolitical currents and the questions of sovereignty and supply chain resilience are most strongly felt here. At the same time, innovation within these fields has never been more urgent. We’re building into that unmet need,"
The Series A round was led by Voyager Ventures to fund the construction of a new production facility in the Thames Valley.
"For sixty years, VLEO has been treated as too hostile an environment for commercial satellites — but it is in fact the most valuable empty real estate in space. Today, no one in the industry has a reliable, affordable, and fast way to fly payloads into very low Earth orbit. We built our NEO-1 satellite to do exactly that,"
Playfair led the pre-seed round for the London-based conversational commerce startup, with participation from several prominent tech angels.
"WhatsApp is about to become the default commerce channel for businesses. OpenAI wants those conversations to happen in ChatGPT and Google wants them in Search, but customers already spend their time on WhatsApp. We built Wassist so brands can own those conversations themselves,"