Callosum raises $100M seed round

A UK AI startup called Callosum has secured a significant $100 million seed round investment in a European venture. Led by Atomico, the round also attracted notable participation from investors such as Plural, DCVC, Sovereign AI from the UK, and angels. This follows a previous $10.25 million funding round in February this year, when Callosum emerged from stealth mode.

Callosum, founded by Cambridge neuroscientists, offers an alternative to the prevailing belief that superintelligence will arise from a single, powerful AI model operating on identical chips. Instead, Callosum's software infrastructure enables AI workloads to run on various chips and AI models, making it faster and cheaper to tackle complex, real-world problems at scale.

The approach has garnered praise from the UK's AI minister and the CEO of US chipmaker Cerebras, who has partnered with Callosum. The startup challenges the notion that AI development and intelligence will be concentrated in the hands of a few major players like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic, as they contend that real-world issues are heterogeneous and require different capabilities.

Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI Minister, commented on the partnership: "By integrating Cerebras into Callosum's platform, we're making ultra-low-latency inference available exactly where it creates the greatest impact, enabling customers to build AI systems that simply weren't practical before."