Neurology, biomanufacturing startups bag UK AI funding
The first recipients of funding under the UK government's £500 million Sovereign AI programme have been announced, intended to help nurture promising, home-grown startups.
The initial group of funding recipients includes Prima Mente, a London and San Francisco company which is using AI to decode the "languages of biology," such as DNA sequence to gene expression and epigenetic regulation, to better understand neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Another is London-based Twig Bio, which is developing a foundation model for AI-driven strain design in engineering biology and biomanufacturing, dubbed CANOPY, for scalable and sustainable manufacturing and bio-ingredient production.
The recipients, which also include AI infrastructure startup Callosum, will also be able to access the UK's supercomputing capacity, with up to 1 million GPU hours available to help train AI models per company.
Other benefits of the programme include fast-track visas, issued within one working day, so they can hire R&D talent from overseas, with costs waived for the initial 10 applications. They will also get hands-on help navigating access to data, early procurement opportunities, independent product validation, and new regulatory initiatives.
Sovereign AI has been built to work like an agile, flexible venture capital firm, according to the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSTI), with a mission to "back Britain's smartest founders and keep the future of AI built on British shores" by helping them scale quickly and compete with international rivals. It allocates funding in tranches of between £1 million and £10 million
According to Ravi Solanki, co-founder of Prima Mente, the initiative has made the UK "the right place to work at the frontier of AI and the life sciences."
The company has research collaborations in place with Oxford University, Imperial College London, the University of Edinburgh, and tech giant NVIDIA, and recently announced its first family of models, Pleiades, focused on human epigenetics in Alzheimer's.
Meanwhile, Twig Bio chief executive and founder Ross Tucker said it "allows us to move beyond incremental strain engineering and build a globally competitive capability in the UK to make biomanufacturing viable for a far broader range of ingredients."
Sovereign AI will continue to assess applications on a rolling basis and is expecting to allocate compute worth tens of millions of pounds to British startups over the course of the year, said DSTI.
"Sovereign AI is unlike anything government has ever done before. Its unique approach will help break down the barriers that have too often held back British enterprise and innovation," commented Technology Secretary Liz Kendall.
"This is how we ensure Britain's economic prosperity and national security in the modern age," she added. "My message to British founders and innovators is clear - we will ensure you never have to choose between your ambition and your home, because Britain will give you both."
