The Week That VCs Bet £3bn on Britain — UK Weekly

May 18, 2026

AI kills the lab coat Isomorphic Labs announced its £1.5bn Series B led by Thrive Capital for AI models that design new drug candidates
Quicker thinking Fractile unlocked £160m from top VCs to deliver chips built to speed up AI inference workloads
The card issue Paymentology announced £130m from Apis Partners and Aspirity Partners for cloud-based card issuing and payment processing infrastructure
Useful HR training? Multiverse secured £52m led by Schroders Capital for AI and data upskilling platform for enterprise workforces
Home-grown security tech Rowden landed £25m in funding from the National Wealth Fund to scale mission-critical national security technology

A cold investment Iceotope raised a £19m Series B led by Two Seas Capital and Barclays Climate Ventures for liquid cooling systems for AI data infrastructure
Killing the invoice Adfin landed a £13m Series A led by Index Ventures for agentic business payments and cash management platform
AI, behave White Circle raised £8m from leading industry angels for platform that monitors AI model behaviour
Bloomberg’s underdog PANTA unlocked a £3m seed round led by Fuel Ventures for cloud-based index creation and portfolio management software
The grid’s flexible friend H2CHP announced £1.5m in funding from Northstar and Blackfinch for fuel-flexible generators built for changing power demands

Aloudable raised a £270k pre-seed led by SFC Capital for its authentic text-to-podcast tool for businesses
Adclear secured a £2.1m seed round led by Outward VC to automate compliance checks on finance marketing materials
Spectral Compute landed a £4.5m seed round led by Costanoa to break “Nvidia Tax” with portable computing software

Carbon Cell secured £1.2m pre-seed led by Green Angel Ventures and Counteract to scale carbon-negative foam
Martello raised £1.2m seed led by Fuel Ventures to transform environmental risk reporting in property transactions
Space Forge unlocked £23m Series A led by NATO Innovation Fund to scale returnable satellite manufacturing platform

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The hottest roles from the Soapbox UK startup jobs board

Multiverse: Workforce training platform hiring across various departments
Fractile: Chip startup building inference hardware hiring engineers
Isomorphic Labs: Drug discovery AI platform hiring across engineers and more

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