Sovereign AI

In April 2026, the UK government set up a venture fund called Sovereign AI. A £500 million pot, launched on 16 April 2026, chaired by Balderton partner @Jameswise with Josephine Kant, ex Google and Y Combinator, running ventures. \n\nThe goal:\nback British AI founders with the speed of a VC and the weight of a state behind it. Liz Kendall called it the government's \"bet on Britain.\"\n\nThe early signs are real. First cheque went to @CallosumAI , an AI infrastructure startup. The second went to @IneffableLabs , founded by David Silver, the man who led reinforcement learning at DeepMind. @Jameswise team reportedly did in weeks what some funds take a year to do. Founders sent dozens of expressions of interest within hours of launch.\n\nAlso @UKSovereignAI pushed hard to do few more amazing things like:\nvisa decisions in one working day, free legal fees to redomicile to the UK and funded access to Britain's largest supercomputers.\n\nBritish AI startups raised over £6 billion in 2025, more than a third of all UK venture capital and the highest share on record. The OECD puts the UK fourth in the world for AI investment behind only the US, the EU bloc and China.\n\nNow the @UKSovereignAI has published what it actually wants to back: \ncompute and chips, new foundation models, AI for drug discovery, AI for scientific discovery and the trust and safety layer that decides which models the world is allowed to deploy.\n\nThe pitch underneath all of it is simple. Britain wants to be an AI maker not an AI taker.