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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak always had a propensity to style himself as the “tech bro” politician. Such branding is not restricted to pensive, hoodie-sporting profile pictures: In November, the UK hosted the first AI Safety Summit—complete with a cozy fireside chat between Sunak and Elon Musk. The UK government has also launched a DARPA-type agency called ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), financing it to the tune of £800 million over four years. In July, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced £50 billion in pension funding to scaleups by 2030.
The question now is whether the formidable British tech economy can retain its prime spot in the global arena—earlier in 2023, when Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI announced the opening of their first offices outside the US, both opted for London—while the rest of the UK economy shows symptoms of inexorable decline. Part of that challenge will depend on a functioning government. Westminster, however, continues to show signs of being chronically preoccupied with its ongoing psychodrama. The highlight of Sunak’s opening speech at London Tech Week, for example, was not what he said about AI or tech regulation. Instead, it was his timid criticism of Boris Johnson over yet another political scandal.
Fuse
Alan Chang decided to launch renewable energy startup Fuse for a simple reason: “I was extremely frustrated by the lack of progress of our net zero transition,” he says. “So I decided I will become part of the solution.” Founded in 2022 with fellow Revolut alumni Charles Orr, Fuse is a renewable energy supplier that, according to Chang, provides customers with the UK’s cheapest electricity tariff as well as allowing them to track in real-time their electricity’s consumption and provenance. The startup has raised $78M, from investors including Balderton Capital, Lakestar, and Accel, and is currently building solar farms on unused land and rooftops. Their plans for the next year? “Fuse is building a one-stop shop to electrify your home and business,” Chang says. New features will include the installation and financing of solar panels and electric vehicles chargers. fuseenergy.com
SOJO
In July, the CEO of SOJO, Josephine Philips, spoke at a TED summit about how “learning how to value things correctly is a climate solution.” “It was in the context of clothing, but the premise can be extrapolated to society as we look at our culture of overconsumption and hyper-disposability,” she says. It’s a topic that has interested her since university. “I began shopping second-hand, but found that so often the clothes didn't fit me or they needed to be repaired—but I had no idea how to sew,” she says. Modernizing and digitizing the tailoring industry is the mission behind SOJO, a platform which allows users to easily book clothes repairs or alterations online with local seamsters, with items delivered via a bicycle service. Founded in 2020, the startup has raised a pre-seed round $2.8m led by Capital T and has partnered with fashion brand Ganni. sojo.uk
Fertifa
“I’ve gone through all the reproductive journeys: I have five children, gave birth to four; I went through three rounds of IVR; I had two pregnancy losses; I’m now perimenopausal and on HRT,” says Eileen Burbidge, CEO of reproductive health benefits startup Fertifa.“I imagine how it might have helped me if I’d felt able to perhaps take a day off when I knew I was having a miscarriage at work.” Fertifa provides the employees of companies including Lululemon, Meta, Centrica, and Space NK with reproductive healthcare benefits and services, such as helping women navigate menopause, or men struggling with sexual health issues. “We've processed more than a million and a half pounds of reimbursements for employees through their employers,” Burbidge says. We've saved those employers about a quarter of a million pounds in compliance costs, making sure that they were eligible claims.” In July 2023, they raised a £5 million seed round, led by leading SaaS investors Notion Capital alongside Triple Point Ventures. fertifa.com
Stability AI
In October 2022, Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI—the company which funded and helped develop text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion—threw a party at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Guests included Google cofounder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, who were there to celebrate the company’s $101 million fund-raise round. Since then, Mostaque has become one of the most vocal proselytizers for open-source AI: he was one of the signatories, alongside Elon Musk and Steven Wozniak, of an open letter calling for a 6-month pause in AI research, and proclaimed that AI will replace human coders by 2028. More recently, on a call with UBS analysts, he said that AI is the “biggest bubble of all time”. The company, founded in late 2020, is currently seeking to fundraise at a valuation of $4 billion. Its new tool, Stable Doodle, can convert a simple line-sketch into a polished, full-color image in a number of different styles, including “cinematic” or “origami”. stability.ai
Unitary
In her previous career, Sasha Haco co-authored scientific papers with the late Stephen Hawking with titles like “Black hole entropy and soft hair”. Currently, she’s the CEO of Unitary, an AI-powered system that helps social media companies to identify and moderate harmful content on their platforms. “We build ‘multimodal AI models’, taking into account all the different signals such as image, text, and audio into a single algorithm to incorporate context and more accurately mirror human understanding,” Haco says. “For example: our models can learn the difference between artistic, medical, and explicit nudity—and apply this understanding to predict the nuances of a platform’s or organization’s policies.” unitary.ai
Infogrid
“We are on a mission: putting a meaningful dent in the 39 percent of global emissions that come from buildings, and making the time we spend indoors healthier and more productive,” says William Cowell De Gruchy, CEO of Infogrid. The company, founded in 2018, installs a network of sensors across commercial buildings to capture data about energy consumption, space usage, and air quality to provide owners with AI-generated insights. According to Infogrid, a recent trial resulted in up to 80 percent reduction in virus risk and 50 percent improvement in productivity, based on their indoor air quality monitoring. The startup works with more than 200 global companies, including partnerships with JLL and CBRE, and has raised $100m so far. infogrid.io
Peppy
Peppy, the healthtech startup launched in 2020 by Mridula Pore, Max Landry, and Evan Harris, provides multinational companies with a support platform for their employees, focusing on issues like menopause, endometriosis, fertility, and baby health. “We saw the real need for individuals and organizations to get support in underserved areas of healthcare—either from working in healthcare or as leaders in large organizations, or when we each personally experienced the ‘holy crap!’ moment of bringing a baby home for the first time.” Through the app, employees can have one-to-one video chats or virtual consultations with specialist health professionals, free of charge. More than 1 million users from 250 companies, including Accenture, Adobe, NVIDIA, and Disney use Peppy. Last October, the company expanded to the US, and earlier this year, it announced a £36 million in series B funding, taking their total to $56.7m. peppy.health
FabricNano
FabricNano’s mission to replace petrochemical products with sustainable alternatives has attracted backers including actress Emma Watson and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone as part of their series A $25m fund raise. “We build and sell biocatalysts to enable sustainable manufacturing of chemicals at scale,” says Grant Aarons, CEO. “If you can string together a few proteins, then you can start to convert sustainable feedstocks, like sugars, into valuable products, like bioplastics.” In April 2023, it announced a partnership with Sumitomo Chemical America to develop a biomanufacturing process for industrial chemicals. “It's the first ever cell-free startup partnering with a commodity chemical manufacturer to produce bio-based alternatives,” Aarons says. fabricnano.com
Wagestream
Peter Briffett’s biggest challenge when he first launched Wagestream in 2018 was convincing companies about the benefits of the “get-paid-as-you-earn” model. “There is a real stigma around people talking about their finances, so in many cases we found that employers simply weren't aware of the issues that their staff were facing, particularly how many employees were being forced into the hands of predatory payday loan companies,” he says. In the current economic climate, companies no longer ignore that reality. Last April, Wagestream, whose service is used by around 250,000 workers in companies such as Burger King and Crate & Barrel, announced a Series C $175 million fund raise. wagestream.co.uk
Sylvera
Last November, climate tech firm Sylvera published a research report with relatively good news for the fight against climate breakdown: According to their research, more than 40 percent of the carbon offsetting projects analyzed by the company were of “high quality”, meaning that they were contributing to CO2 removal. The startup uses machine learning and satellite imagery to make such assessments, a method developed over a decade by cofounder Allister Furey, who has a PhD in computational neuroscience and robotics. In partnership with the Mozambique government, it is currently conducting research using laser-scanning to develop more accurate methods of tracking forest carbon stocks. sylvera.com
This article appears in the January/February 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
Updated 1-15-2024 4:00 pm GMT: The entry for Tesseract was updated to reflect the company rebranding as Fuse.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
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