UK AI startup Callosum has closed a $100m (£73.5m) seed round in the first investment from the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
Headquartered in London, Callosum is building systems software to match specific AI tasks with the cheapest suitable models and chips, with the aim of solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.
The seed round is led by Atomico with significant participation from Plural, DCVC and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, alongside other investors and angels.
The Sovereign AI Fund was launched by the UK government in April as a £500m investment in UK AI to create jobs and drive economic growth.
“The defining question of the next decade will not be “which model is better?” but “which combination of models, on which silicon, together solve my problem under my constraints of cost and speed?”” Callosum said on a blog on its website announcing the raise.
“This is heterogeneous intelligence: treating AGI [artificial general intelligence] not as one solution but as a space of capabilities matched to the problem at hand. It is how nature evolves intelligence, and we have already shown it to be the superior approach for many of the most important problems we want AI to solve. The advantage compounds as the explosion accelerates.”
The seed round marks one of the largest ever achieved at this stage by a UK-based company.
“AI is nothing without the chips that underpin it – and the eye-watering demand for them is only going to grow,” says Kanishka Narayan, minister for artificial intelligence.
“In the race to develop and use AI, success will depend not just on having access to those chips, but on using them as efficiently as possible.”
