Sovereign AI Fund

Isomorphic was built in London.

It's backed by the UK Sovereign AI Fund, which is on the cap table.

And whilst Europe is arguing about whether Mistral can keep up with OpenAI, this is the UK competing on AI for Science instead.

And that's where we have a real edge.

We talked a lot about, we talked about this last week, about the UK's ability to succeed in venture.

And Isomorphic was built in London.

It's backed by the UK Sovereign AI Fund, which is on the cap table.

And whilst Europe is arguing about whether Mistral can keep up with OpenAI, this is the UK competing on AI for Science instead.

be really clear about who our Premier League companies are in the sectors that we have a right to win in.

So the story that we're telling is about these brilliant companies, these brilliant founders, and then do what we're already doing when I look at something like the Sovereign AI Funds.

So £500 million from government going into the top tier of AI companies in the UK and an AI minister that then says, and we will pull every lever that government has to support these businesses.

Yeah.

Salience Labs in Oxfordshire build all-optical switches.

Ollix, founded only in twenty twenty-four, raised three hundred and twelve million dollars at a three point three billion dollar valuation in August, with Arm and the UK Sovereign AI Fund on the ticket.

Kalisum write the software that spreads a workload across different chips, took the Sovereign AI Fund's first equity check in April, and a one hundred million dollar seed round led by Atomico in August.

None of these is proven at production scale together.

All of them are British.

We've been really heartened to see over the last few months some quite ambitious new initiatives being launched.

Obviously, there's the Sovereign AI Fund launched.

We've seen, you know, the announcement of the scale up concierge service, which for those who aren't aware of that, it's essentially going to be set up within the Department for Business and Trade, which will help support scale ups to both navigate different government departments.

and unblock some of the things that are hampering their growth.

Haven't seen her reappear anywhere, but similar sort of thing, moving between, in this case, private and the private industry and the government.

And then we come to the interesting case of the Sovereign AI Fund.

Oh, would this be... tony rearing his ugly head again some would call this man a war criminal not us no no no but his daughter-in-law the lovely suzanne ashman has recently been appointed as the managing partner of the uk government's see the theme here sovereign ai fund that is a 500 million pound venture fund and guess who puts the 500 million in jonathan can you guess Would that be private sector money, Paul? That would be what they call taxpayer-backed.

Stuff that's come out of our wallets, you mean.

That stuff.

Fair comment.

And also, they've also started the Sovereign AI Fund as well.

Any quick impressions?

I think it's great that they set up the Sovereign AI Fund and that the government continues to invest in the British Business Bank.

because I think they've demonstrated they have a model which is really effective in deploying capital and in allocating capital.

And I think that it's fantastic that they're continuing to do that.

So I'm really hopeful that Sovereign AI Fund will continue to help companies scale, that will help Britain continue to build on its strengths.

And yeah, I look forward to seeing what happens with the investments that they make.

So there's maybe a competitiveness case here, but I don't think that's very well articulated often, and I think that's partly why we're often seeing backlash to, to this, th- this build-out.

Maybe another example of this, veers slightly off compute, but it's related, is the Sovereign AI Fund, right? A lot to be commended there, but the majority of investments actually it seems have been so far in US-controlled companies.

So there's a question about are we targeting that right? Is it actually, uh, you know, tackling a problem that the UK has identified i- in terms of sovereignty? Is it targeted enough to do that? So there's some fuzziness of ambitions.

Mm-hmm.