UK companies training large, general-purpose AI models.
Early-stage London
Develops foundation models for energy operations, combining physics-based modelling with machine learning to help operators run complex industrial facilities more efficiently. Its platform is called Orbital. Founded by Imperial College alumni and headquartered in London, with offices in Houston and Bengaluru.
Early-stage London
Builds a very large biological database by sampling genetic diversity from nature, then uses it to train generative foundation models for biology and drug discovery. Headquartered in London, with a laboratory in Boston.
Growth Cambridge
Builds AI models that discover and design new materials, starting with compounds that capture carbon. Headquartered in Cambridge and founded in 2024 by researchers with roots in Google DeepMind and academia.
Early-stage London
Builds in-memory-compute AI inference chips designed to speed up large-language-model inference and cut its cost. Headquartered in London.
Early-stage London
Builds decentralised infrastructure for training, verifying, and coordinating machine learning across distributed compute. Headquartered in London.
Acquired London
Runs one of the world's leading AI research labs, behind breakthroughs including AlphaFold, AlphaGo, and the Gemini family of models. Headquartered in London and part of Google, it anchors much of the UK's AI research base.
Acquired Bristol
Designs AI accelerator processors, its Intelligence Processing Units, and the systems and software that run machine-learning workloads on them. Headquartered in Bristol.
Seed London
Builds reinforcement-learning systems designed to discover new knowledge and skills without relying on human-generated data. Founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former head of reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind and a lead researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Headquartered in London.
Growth London
Applies AI to drug discovery, using models descended from AlphaFold to predict how molecules behave and design new medicines. Headquartered in London as an Alphabet company spun out of DeepMind.
Seed London
Uses generative AI to design proteins from scratch, aiming to make biology programmable and speed up the discovery of new therapeutics such as antibodies and enzymes. Founded in 2023 by Simon Kohl, a former co-lead of DeepMind's protein-design team and a scientist on AlphaFold2. Headquartered in London.
Early-stage London
Designs new materials using a "foundation model for atoms", targeting applications such as carbon capture, cleaner fuels, and cooling for AI data centres. Founded in 2022 by Jonathan Godwin, previously part of DeepMind's materials research. Headquartered in London.
Growth London
Develops open generative-AI models spanning image, video, audio and 3D, best known for the Stable Diffusion family of image models. Headquartered in London.
Growth London
Builds self-driving software that learns to drive end-to-end from cameras, without the HD maps or lidar most rivals rely on. Headquartered in London and licensing its system to carmakers.
Transport for London has granted private hire licences to 15 of Wayve's self-driving cars, clearing the way for supervised robotaxi rides in the capital with Uber. A trained safety driver stays on board for now, with the first trips due later this summer.
New PitchBook figures show UK startups raised £14.4B in the first half of 2026, with more than 70% of it going to AI and the UK taking close to 40% of all European AI funding. It is the data behind a year of big rounds, and a sign of how sharply capital is concentrating.
The UK government's AI Security Institute has stood up a dedicated Control Red Team to stress-test the safeguards that frontier labs rely on. It reported finding vulnerabilities in every version of the internal safety monitors used by Anthropic and Google DeepMind, sharpening the UK's role in frontier-AI oversight.
Cambridge company CuspAI has raised around £334M to scale its AI system for discovering new materials, in one of the largest UK AI rounds of the year. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund among the backers.
Isomorphic Labs, the London drug-discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, has raised $2.1B in its first external round, led by Thrive Capital with backing from Alphabet and GV. The money is meant to carry its AI-designed drugs toward the clinic.