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According to the latest statistics, there were a total of 1,797 active high growth AI start-ups in the UK, with investments totalling £3.21bn in equity funding in 2022 alone. Another report puts the total number of UK AI start-ups that received funding of $1.5m and over between 2013-2023 at 727. This second metric is important because it can be used to rank the UK as an AI start-up hub vs the rest of the world. In this global measurement, the UK comes in an impressive 3rd place for most AI start-ups after the USA (5,509) and China (1,446). In terms of total amounts of private equity raised by these AI companies, the values were $335bn in the United states, $104bn in China and $22bn in the UK (being 3rd place again). It is understandable that the number of start-ups and funding amounts in the UK lag the world’s 2 super-economies but versus the rest of the developed nations in the world it is a real world leader in terms of AI development and investment.
With this in mind Get Business Grants actively tracks the investments and number of funding rounds that AI start-ups in the UK have been receiving. We are going to showcase below a number of AI start-ups that have received funding rounds from private and public sources. We are particularly interested as a grant site at looking into start-ups that have received one or more funding rounds involving a grant-based investment from Innovate UK and comparing how much funding they received overall and the type of things they received investment for versus companies that relied on funding from private based funding sources only.
Profiles of UK AI Start-ups Awarded Funding
Company 1 – Octaipipe
What does the company do?
Octaipipe is headquartered in London and was founded in 2016. It specialises in end to end Edge AI model delivery for critical systems in the energy, utilities, manufacturing and telecoms sectors.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
Yes, Octaipipe received a £500,000 grant from Innovate UK as part of a £3.5m pre-Series A 2024 fundraising round led by SuperSeed with Forward Partners, D2, Atlas Ventures, Martlet Capital, Gelecek Etki VC and Deeptech Labs also participating.
What has the company received funding for?
The purpose of the funding round was to help further develop and scale the deployment of its Federated Learning programme to address security vulnerabilities in Machine Learning for IoT for multiple sectors that utilise critical systems.
How much funding in total has the company received?
Cumulatively the company has raised a total of £4m across 2 rounds, including the £3.5m round described above. Previously Octaipipe received a total of £495,000 in a 2022 seed round from Growceanu Angel Investment.
Company 2 – AMPLY Discovery
What does the company do?
AMPLY Discovery is based in Belfast and was founded in 2021 and is classed as a techbio company. Their innovative platform backed by over 10 years of research and development helps power the discovery of cures for cancer, metabolic, and infectious diseases through the utilisation of AI and synthetic biology. The company is actually a commercialised spin out from Queen’s University Belfast.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
Yes, AMPLY Discovery has actually been awarded 2 rounds of Innovate UK grants in 2024 totalling £1.44m. The first programme received £835,000 from Innovate UK and Innosuisse to develop a new RNAi therapy for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. The second programme received £602,000 from Innovate UK to develop a new nebulised antimicrobial product to help fight multi-drug resistant (MDR) lung infections.
What has the company received funding for?
The purpose of the Innovate UK grant rounds were for research and development activities in the highly innovative and experimental areas where AMPLY Discovery uses AI technology platforms and synthetic biology to develop highly specific and targeted medical solutions for critical illnesses.
How much funding in total has the company received?
Cumulatively the company has raised a total of £2.95m across multiple rounds, including the £1.44m round described above. The company also received $20,000 from Techstars in 2023, an additional £602,000 grant from Innovate UK in 2023 and also a £900,000 seed funding round in 2023 involving QUBIS Innovation Fund, Helix Way, Halo Business Angel Network and Co-FundNI.
It is worth noting that the Co-Fund NI programme is another public backed fund that has earmarked a total of £47.3m to invest alongside private investors such as business angels into eligible SMEs based in Northern Ireland. The fund is supported by Invest NI and the British Business Bank.
Company 3 – Medwise AI
What does the company do?
Medwise AI is a Cambridge based digital health company founded in 2019. The company has a customisable searchable AI platform based on natural language that assists healthcare professionals in getting accurate clinical information at the point of care.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
Yes, Medwise AI was awarded an Innovate UK Smart Grant in 2024 worth a total of £311,000. Innovate UK Smart Grants are ran multiple times per year and offer funding for SMEs that provide game-changing and commercially viable R&D innovations that can significantly impact the UK economy.
What has the company received funding for?
The Smart Grant funding is for Medwise AI to expand their artificial intelligence-powered clinical question-answering search platform into secondary care settings. It will help them run an 18-month project in NHS settings that will drive the evolution of the Medwise platform to support the healthcare workforce in acute medicine. It is estimated that the use of Medwise to look things up in a clinical setting can save on average 2.6 minutes per patient during consultations looking up medical information.
How much funding in total has the company received?
Cumulatively Medwise AI has raised a total of £1.6m in funding across multiple rounds, including the £311,000 round described above. The company also received £160,000 in seed capital in 2024 from SFC Capital, £1.1m in seed capital in 2023 from several investors including StartUp Health, Stanford Angels of the United Kingdom, SFC Capital, Finance Yorkshire, DigitalHealth, London Accelerator, Deeptech Labs and Calm/Storm Ventures.
Company 4 – Enzai
What does the company do?
Enzai is a Belfast based AI start-up founded in 2021 that specialises in helping organisations understand and manage the risks of AI and also meet regulatory obligations with its artificial intelligence governance platform.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
No, the company has not received any Innovate UK funding to date, but most recently raised £3.2m in a 2023 seed funding round involving Techstart Ventures, Seedcamp and Cavalry Ventures and a number of angel investors.
What has the company received funding for?
The seed round funding is going to be used to expand Enzai’s teams in engineering, operations, policy, sales, and marketing and further develop their governance software platform.
How much funding in total has the company received?
Enzai has not received any other publicly disclosed rounds of funding, although it is believed that a small undisclosed private investment was made into the company in 2022. So this puts the publicly known value of investments into the company at £3.2m, based on the funding round mentioned above.
Company 5 – Cambrian Robotics
What does the company do?
Cambrian Robotics is a machine vision AI start-up headquartered in London founded in 2021 and also has an office in Germany. The company is building a technology platform that combines the use of both AI and robotics in advanced manufacturing settings to make a truly hands free development process, where human beings only interact at control level from a computer.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
No, to date Cambrian Robotics has not received any Innovate UK funding, but it recently received a seed funding round of £2.7m led by Cybernetix Ventures and KST Invest GmbH and also included Yamaha Motor Ventures and Digital Media Professionals (DMP).
What has the company received funding for?
This latest round of funding will be used to continue to develop its artificial intelligence platform to enable robot arms to “surpass human capabilities in complex vision-based tasks across a variety of industries”. The system uses AI-driven vision software and camera hardware and enables robots that have already been developed to automate complex tasks that were previously only possible with certain levels of manual intervention.
How much funding in total has the company received?
In addition to the funding round mentioned above, Cambrian Robotics also received an additional early seed round funding from ff Venture Capital in 2021 after the start-up graduated from its accelerator AI Nexus Lab. This funding was worth £558,000. This means that the company has received cumulative funding worth £3.25m.
Company 6 – Imaginario AI
What does the company do?
Imaginario AI is a London based artificial intelligence start-up founded in 2021. The company has developed an AI video content management software that allows companies to build video search and curation workflows with a powerful vector-based API and no-code platform.
Has the Company received Innovate UK funding?
No, the company has not received any Innovate UK funding to date, however it recently received pre-seed funding worth £756,000 in 2023. The funding participants included Techstars, Comcast, Blue Lake VC and Earthling VC. There was also funding from strategic angels including AI engineers from Meta and Google.
What has the company received funding for?
The purpose of the latest round of funding was to further develop existing products and also develop new concepts, such as video AI agents which will simplify Imaginario AI’s user experience and automate specific tasks for teams across the media supply chain, production and marketing functions.
How much funding in total has the company received?
Even though the company is still classed as being in pre-seed stage it has already received multiple rounds of funding. In addition to the above described funding round it also received an additional pre-seed round of £540,000 earlier in 2023 involving Blue Lake and 216 Capital. There were also smaller funding rounds of pre-seed funding also in 2023 of £92,000 involving Techstars and Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs and finally an undisclosed angel investor that put £77,000 into the company in 2022. This means that the company has had a cumulative funding total of £1.47m.
What Do the Profiled Companies Tell Us About The Funding Environment for UK AI Start-ups?
Looking at the profiles and funding that the 6 AI companies listed above have received, it is clear that for the right innovative ideas it is possible to raise millions over just a few years after founding a company. It is also possible to take multiple different route options to receive the funding, either by looking for Government grant support from Innovate UK as part of the funding mix or to go straight to private equity, venture capital and angel investors only. Every single investor type will have their own risk profiles and types of AI opportunities they will be willing to put money into, so it is important to put together a solid business plan and have exciting and novel technology that stands out in a very crowded AI market. AI is currently the latest hot topic trend so lots of investors want to put money into the sector in hope a huge pay-off from backing the latest “unicorn” company, but it also means that a lot of other potential start-ups are using AI technology in order to try and one day become the next Google or Meta sized company, so competition is particularly tough. Investors have to look past the vast range of similar companies that are just offering a basic ChatGPT style chat-bot that don’t take AI any further than where it was a few years ago.
What Stands Out About the AI Companies Who Also Received Innovate UK Grant Funding?
From looking at some of the companies who have received grant funding from Innovate UK on top of other private investment funding it is clear that they stand apart in terms of the highly experimental and innovative product and service offerings they are developing. Innovate UK typically focuses on cutting edge technology development as it looks to maintain the UK’s global position as a world leading location for research and development. This means that it is more willing to take risks on unproven and very niche or novel approaches to practical solutions for industrial applications. Innovate UK uses its industry and research sector expertise to see how it can assist start-up and other innovative companies in creating disruptive technology that can transform processes for an entire industry. With that in mind, we can see from the Innovate UK grant backed AI start-ups profiled above that these companies are using AI to enhance existing fields, such as pharmaceuticals, medical patient care and sectors using critical systems. They are looking at novel approaches to revolutionise these sectors using AI and make huge efficiency and cost savings for companies that will eventually harness these technologies once they have developed past the experimental and concept stage.
What Are The Advantages Of Considering Innovate UK Grants As Part Of Your Funding Mix?
If an AI or other tech start-up is looking for funding from multiple sources then one of the main advantages of receiving grant funding from Innovate UK is that they are more likely to take a risk and back highly experimental, feasibility and prototype level research and development activities. As they are providing the money as a grant, they have already factored in the risk if feasibility or concept ideas do not pan out to become commercially viable, but recognise the company has high potential to succeed. Other private investors want to back a commercially viable concept and receive a return and put in their money taking either an equity stake in the company or expecting a loan to be repaid.
Another benefit is if a company receives Innovate UK funding as a grant in a current round or has received funding from them in the past, it is a signal to other investors that the world respected UK Government backed funding agency recognises the company in question as one that has high potential and gives other investors confidence to then also go in and provide additional funding.
Innovate UK also has access to a network of investors who are interested in carrying out co-investment activities with them.
How Do You Apply For Innovate UK Funding Of This Type?
Innovate UK has a number of funding programmes in operation at any given time, based on their latest strategies and key areas of development interest. The use of AI across UK industries is currently a prominent funding theme and the best way to find out more about potential funding opportunities is to browse their current funding opportunities on their site or speak to an Innovate UK advisor.
There are also funding support advisors from other various companies and business support organisations who can assist AI start-ups with funding options from the UK Government, EU funding opportunities, traditional bank loan facilities as well as venture capital and angel investment opportunities.
Find Out More About AI Funding Opportunities
Businesses can also access a filtered list of AI funding grant and loan opportunities available for the UK. To find out a full and regularly updated list of the current opportunities available for AI start-ups to apply for, visit https://getbusinessgrants.com/ for details.
