Artificial intelligence has become the new entrepreneurial frontier to cross. From ChatGPT to Google’s Bard, a technological race has begun and innovative businesses everywhere are looking to break the latest AI product.
The UK is exceptionally well positioned to lead the AI charge, with a vibrant startups sector that is seizing the new possibilities that artificial intelligence offers.
As the UK government strides ahead to become a world leader in AI, UK startups have already received the memo, with numerous businesses at the forefront of AI innovation. In this article, we highlight the top 20 UK AI startups to keep on your radar.
The UK’s AI Innovation Whitepaper - What is it all about?
Earlier this month, the UK government published its AI whitepaper, laying out a roadmap to drive innovation in the sector. It proposes a regulatory model that, is hoped, will drive growth in the AI sector. It;s part of the UK’s national AI strategy, which over the next 10 years, seeks to position the UK as an AI global superpower.
Among other things, it proposes to:
- Avoid heavy-handed legislation so that AI innovation is not stifled
- Give responsibility to individual existing regulators as opposed to an overarching body, so AI can be developed in a context-specific manner for each industry
- Promptly draft rules for the use of AI to become a leading voice in the international conversation
- Nurture public trust in the use of AI
It’s hoped the plan will help unleash the benefits of AI, which already contributes £3.7 billion to the UK economy.
Top AI Companies in the UK to watch
To understand what the future of AI in the UK will look like, we’ve found the top 20 startups using the emerging technology in the most innovative, useful, and creative ways.They made this list due to their collection of funding successes, unique way of using AI, and overall inspiring business stories.
PolyAI
Founders: Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Pei-Hao Su
Founded: 2017
Website: poly.ai
The impending pain of having to call customer service is something any customer can relate to. What’s more, with rising call centre costs and the push to divert customer support to online chats, it can be even worse to realise you can’t even make a phone call at all. This is where PolyAI steps in. Its artificial intelligence voice assistants have been designed so smoothly it’s hard to distinguish whether you’re talking to an AI or a human being. Contrary to other AI voice assistants, PolyAI’s technology is reactive rather than predictive, which means the technology actually listens and understands what you’re saying.
PolyAI recently secured $40m in a Series B funding round and is looking to increase its global expansion. Major UK brands including Metro Bank, Greene King, Whitbread and Starling Bank are already entrusting customer support calls to PolyAI’s technology. It also snatched up the seventh spot in the Startups 100 2023 Index.
Infogrid
Founders: William Cowell De Gruchy
Founded: 2018
Website: infogrid.io
If your eyes have watered at the sight of your latest office electricity bill or if you constantly grumble about how cold the air conditioner is, Infogrid offers a smart AI-powered solution. Through AI-controlled automations, Infogrid gets rid of the hassle of fine-tuning the conditions of your office and saves you having to hire external contractors. It aims to make every building healthy, efficient, and sustainable.
Infogrid recently raised $90 million in a Series B funding round and has won countless awards for its technology, including the Corporate Vision Technology Innovator Awards.
Intelistyle
Founders: Michael Michelis and Kostas Koukoravas
Founded: 2018
Website: intelistyle.com
As everyday as the task might seem, picking an outfit can be a daunting decision. Any ecommerce fashion website will be ripe with options, which, to a shopper, might feel overwhelming. Intelistyle offers a unique AI styling experience, saving you a personal stylist and the headache of visualising your potential outfits in your head.
Intelistyle uses AI to personalise shopping experiences for customers. Its tech is already used by major fashion retailers, including H&M, Tommy Hilfiger and D&G. The startup harnesses information about outfits customers already own to make recommendations on what they should buy next. Impressively, in London Fashion Week 2019, Intelistyle’s AI programming outperformed professional stylists, catching the attention of the likes of Forbes, and our own Startups 100 listings. It has received numerous accolades, including Best AI Product in Fashion in the CogX awards in 2021.
TeamSportz
Founders: Francisco Baptista
Founded: 2019
Website: teamsportz.pro
What if there was a way to improve your athletic skills on demand, regardless of what sport you play? With the TeamSportz app, that is possible. The platform enables clubs to run their teams more efficiently and gain access to elite performance stats with unique AI technology. Its features include the ability to track players’ goals and performance with intuitive dashboards and personalised statistics.
TeamSportz efforts to democratise access to sports technology have already bred success. It secured a paid partnership with London Sports and, to date, the startup has more than 2,000 active players using the platform. It has also raised funding from investors in the UK and the US, including sporting giant Strava’s founder, Mark Gainey.
KYC Hub
Founders: Farnoush Mirmoeini and Jay Rao
Founded: 2017
Website: kychub.com
KYC Hub is boosting business confidence by enabling firms to lower their risk of falling victim of financial fraud through the power of AI. Its technology focuses on reducing processing time when conducting due diligence procedures and enhanced checks on businesses or individuals. Its meticulous design has uncovered hidden risks that other due diligence processes may not. For clients, this results in a 40-80% reduction in operational costs.
KYC Hub’s impressive track record has already led it to being shortlisted for five categories in the RegTech Insights Award, competing against publicly listed companies and multinational corporations with thousands of employees. The company has customers from Singapore to the US, and is planning to empower organisations to prevent financial crime in even more locations.
Sprout.ai
Founders: Raphael Gouth and Niels Thoné
Founded: 2018
Website: sprout.ai
Submitting and processing an insurance claim is stuff that can come straight out of nightmares. Not only is it slow, but it requires navigating a dense sea of documents and unstructured data. This is where Sprout.ai guides the way as the lighthouse that both claimants and insurers were looking for.
Sprout’s AI software has been developed specifically for the insurance industry, and streamlines the entire process from claim to settlement. Processes that would previously take months can now be done in near real-time. Sprout has already been able to bring its cutting-edge technology to insurance giants like Zurich and MetLife, and has raised £8 million in Series A funding.
Genie AI
Founders: Nitish Mutha and Rafie Faruq
Founded: 2017
Website: genieai.co
If you’re not a lawyer (and sometimes, even if you are), it’s likely that the legal world feels complicated, obscure, and difficult to understand. Genie AI is trying to change that. The London-based startup seeks to make legal services available and affordable to everyone by providing open-source access to hundreds of legal business templates.
With Genie’s smart machine learning, anyone can review documents on the platform and proof clauses against thousands of past deals. What’s more, its technology enables firms to customise their documents based on relevant context, like sector, business size, jurisdiction, and contract type. The startup has garnered impressive success, with over 100 organisations signing up to Genie AI every day and experiencing a 30-fold rate of growth in one year with zero marketing spend.
Clever Lili Ltd
Founders: Alex Hak and Petia Hak
Founded: 2019
Website: https://www.gcsehistory.com/
Scouring the internet for GCSE revision materials can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. The task becomes even more difficult for neuro-diverse students who struggle to find means of catching up with their peers. That’s why Clever Lili launched the app, designed to help students with ADD/ADHD, dyslexia and other neurodiverse conditions to approach revision with confidence.
The app is unique thanks to its karaoke function, which highlights text as the AI reads it aloud. The voice can be slowed down, sped up, or even turned off depending on the student’s or teacher’s preference. The AI app has already acquired considerable industry acceptance. In 2021, it became a finalist in the Education Resources Awards 2021. It has also received support from multiple UK exam boards including Edexcel, CIE, and AQA.
Mintago
Founder: Chieu Cao
Founded: 2017
Website: mintago.com
In the midst of a bleak economic winter, users are in need of a platform that can help them better manage their finances. Mintago identified this gap in the market and launched a platform fully focused on financial wellbeing, particularly for better managing pensions. It comes equipped with a whole host of features, including free IFA access, an interactive AI helper, and budgeting tools.
Mintago’s service is unique in that it isn’t biased towards any one pension provider. Employees can contribute to their pension with confidence, and decide whether to keep their pension pots separate or combine them for ease using the Mintago “pension hunter” tool. Employers are guided through the implementation of salary sacrifice pension in a hassle-free way. Mintago claims to have saved over £1 million for businesses and found over £10 million of missing pensions for employees. Recently, it won the Best Personal Budgeting Service Awards in the Fintech Breakthrough Awards.
Jiva.ai
Founders: Dr Manish Patel, Chetan Kaher, and Sarah D'Souza
Founded: 2019
Website: jiva.ai
Although AI is rapidly becoming more normalised, building artificial intelligence products is still a difficult task to tame. Developing an AI or AI-powered service can often be complex and expensive, making smaller businesses feel like adopting the technology is a pipe dream. Jiva.ai, however, is designed to make that pipe dream a reality.
This AI builder platform offers a scalable solution for companies of all sizes, helping entrepreneurs create their own AI function thanks to its approachable tools.
The platform has already found a major footing by offering solutions to the medical research industry. It has established partnerships with GE Healthcare, Roche Diagnostics, plus other NHS and academic institutions in the UK and globally.
Gigged.AI
Founders: Rich Wilson and Craig Short
Founded: 2021
Website: gigged.ai
Finding the right staff and contractors can be an arduous and time-consuming process. Gigged.AI wants to change this, by giving recruitment a true 21st century spin by using AI. The company’s AI-driven marketplace means it’s able to match companies with the most suitable candidates in just ten seconds, automating one of the most time-consuming tasks for managers.
Gigged.AI has also utilised the power of NFTs to design its GigChain platform. This offers freelancers a way to easily and securely verify their identity, work history, certifications and more. Despite its young company age, Gigged.AI already has 200 clients, including the BBC and Leidos and has received over 5,000 freelancer sign ups. Further attesting to its success, it was also awarded £100,000 through the SMART Scotland Grant.
Wayve
Founders: Alex Kendall and Amar Shah
Founded: 2017
Website: wayve.ai
Autonomous vehicles are no longer the stuff of science fiction, and in a market rushing to capitalise on this potential, Wayve is making…well, waves. The self-driving car startup is building end-to-end machine learning algorithms to make cars smarter than ever before. As opposed to “conventional” self-driving cars, Wayve builds a comprehensive data-driven system that doesn’t depend on a certain range of given “if-else” statements. This makes the vehicle safer in unfamiliar situations.
Wayve has secured $200 million in funding and has partnered with Microsoft. More recently, it launched a partnership with Asda to launch the UK’s largest self-driving grocery home delivery trial.
Stability AI
Founder: Emad Mostaque
Founded: 2021
Website: stability.ai
DreamStudio home page, product of Stability AI
Stability’s AI ethos is to democratise access to the technology to foster global creativity and innovation. With a network that surpasses 14,000 developers, Stability AI is backed by research communities that are creating the newest AI products – from imaging, to code, to audio, to 3D content.
Stability AI first launched Stable Diffusion in 2022, which is a pioneering text-to-image model. By adding a few prompts, such as “a Tibetan mastiff in the style of Gustav Klimpt”, you can see jaw-dropping image results in moments.
Stability AI has raised $101 million in funding and has made plenty of headlines as the text-to-image tool captivated users around the world.
Haiper
Founders: Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang
Founded: 2021
Website: haiper.ai
As generative AI continues to evolve, Haiper is jumping into the mix with a new 3D reality recreation technology. Haiper has launched two products so far – Captur3 and AIGC. The first lets you take 3D ‘pictures’ so you can capture your favourite moments and objects in its most life-like variation. The second takes the text-to-image AI technology one step further by making text-to-3D models a possibility.
Although Haiper is still in a nascent stage, it’s already raised $13.8 million in a seed round, so it’s definitely a project to keep your eyes peeled for.
Capture3, a Haiper product
Charm Therapeutics
Founders: Laksh Aithani and David Baker
Founded: 2021
Website: charmtx.com
The pandemic made us painfully aware of how crucial it is to be equipped with the latest cutting edge medical insights, so medical research can respond to new and existing diseases. Charm Therapeutics is an example of how AI technology can cross new medical frontiers. It uses AI 3D deep learning technology to deliver new medicines that can target cancers and other diseases with high unmet medical need.
So far, Charm Therapeutics has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round. It’s also backed by reputable investors like OrbiMed Healthcare Fund management, F Prime and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Mosaic TX
Founders: Mathew Garnett, Adrian Ibrahim, Emile Voest
Founded: 2020
Website: mosaic-tx.com
Charm Therapeutics is not the only AI startup expanding the frontiers of medical technology. Mosaic TX is using AI to help develop oncology therapeutics, working towards making cancer treatments safer and more effective. Currently, it’s incredibly time consuming and costly to test all potential drug, target and therapeutic hypotheses.
Through machine learning and statistical methods, Mosaic TX wants to make the discovery of new cancer drugs and treatments a quicker process.
Mosaic TX recently closed $28 million in a Series A funding round and is backed by investors like Syncona, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Innovate UK.
Salience Labs
Founders: Vaysh Kewada and Dr. Johannes Feldmann
Founded: 2021
Website: saliencelabs.ai
To seize the AI revolution, developers will need to have new, shiny and powerful hardware. That’s where Salience Labs comes in. Staffed by a full team of physicists, coders and engineers, Salience Labs is developing chips that use light to execute operations. This boosts processing performance and accelerates exponential advances in AI.
The research is based on decades of research from the University of Oxford and Münster University in Germany. Salience Labs’s technological proposal has already inspired confidence amongst investors. It recently raised $11.5 million in seed funding and has partnered with Cambridge Innovation Capital, Deeptech Labs, and Oxford Investment Consultants.
Salience Labs chip prototype
Solvo.ai
Founder: Gaurav Bajaj
Founded: 2021
Website: solvo.ai
When the war in Ukraine started and the cost-of-living crisis exploded, we were reminded of how fragile our supply chains can be. Solvo.ai wants to change that and make them more resilient than before. Using value-driven machine learning, Solvo.ai wants to simplify decision making, accelerate recovery and improve resilience in global supply chains. The idea is to help firms adapt to..
