UK AI start-up Callosum secures $100m in seed funding round

UK-based AI start-up Callosum has secured $100 million in its seed funding round. This innovative company focuses on reducing AI costs by pairing each task with the most cost-effective and suitable models and chips. Founded in 2025 by two Cambridge University neuroscientists, Danyal Akarca (CEO and CTO) and Jascha Achterberg, Callosum's software directs specific AI tasks to the most appropriate models and chips, offering an alternative to high-end, powerful graphic processors and AI strategies for every company.

The company's seed funding was led by venture capital firm Atomico, with significant participation from the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund and additional investors Plural and DCVC. Callosum has established partnerships with chipmaker Cerebras Systems and deals with Rebellions Inc and Axelera AI.

The UK minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, emphasized the importance of efficient chip usage in AI development. He stated, "AI is nothing without the chips that underpin it and the eye-watering demand for them is only going to grow. In the race to develop and use AI, success will depend not just on having access to those chips, but on using them as efficiently as possible."

As other organizations globally invest in AI hardware, UK AI hardware start-up Fractile is reportedly in talks for a $600 million funding round at a pre-money valuation of $6.5 billion. This round aims to enable cheaper AI token processing for faster model reasoning. Similarly, US AI company Etched raised $700 million in a new funding round led by US trading firm Jane Street, focusing on building inference clusters to make AI inference faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

In March of this year, global leader Nvidia announced a multi-year partnership with Thinking Machines Lab, which will utilize Nvidia's systems to train its AI frontier models.