Simon Ford

⏮️ Last week £182m was announced across 13 UK venture rounds Some highlights from the Soapbox platform 💻 and newsletter 🗞️ include... Spectral Compute secured a £4.5m seed round led by Costanoa Ventures to help companies run Nvidia-based code on alternative chips, avoiding hardware backlogs and lock-ins. Adclear raised an oversubscribed £2m seed round led by Outward VC. The platform is used by top finance brands and banks to deliver compliance feedback on social and marketing content. Limetrack landed £1.3m from Innovate UK and various angels to scale its IoT-enabled “SMART” bin that automatically weighs and reports commercial food waste. Aloudable secured £270k pre-seed led by SFC Capital to authenticate its text-to-conversation tool for businesses to launch pro podcasts with AI. AI Score launches from GALLOS Technologies venture studio with a £750k pre-seed to help organisations govern AI systems safely and responsibly.

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Glad to have had the opportunity to attend the ChipStart Edinburgh event last week, with several semiconductor startups building AI accelerators, quantum control chips, and more. The hardware innovation is staggering, and there's clearly strong funding flowing toward great ideas. Software came up repeatedly in conversations—it's the key to unlocking all this potential. Even the best silicon needs great software to reach its full potential. Looking forward to participating in the UK AI and hardware ecosystem! #AI #Semiconductors #ChipStart #Edinburgh

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Great to see the UK government committing £40m to a new frontier AI research lab as reported by Madhumita Murgia in the Financial Times today. Any investment in AI is welcome and this signals real intent. But let's be honest with ourselves. £40m and 2 million GPU hours a year is not going to out-muscle the billions being poured into LLMs by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. We have to be ruthlessly strategic about where the UK can genuinely win. Initiatives like this, and others like the R&D tax credit system must focus on the domains where we have deep scientific heritage, world-class universities, and industries crying out for transformation. Engineering AI, AI for science, AI-native manufacturing is where the UK can excel. Imagine what genuinely AI-native manufacturing could do for the UK's industrial base - reimagining processes from the ground up rather than just automating what already exists. The regenerative impact on productivity, jobs, and global competitiveness could be profound. That's the kind of moonshot this investment should be supporting. The US will dominate general-purpose foundation models. That race is largely won. But the application of AI to hard physical and scientific problems is where the UK has the talent, the institutions, and frankly, the motivation - we must make sure that every pound and every GPU cycle is pointed in the right direction.

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One of the most valuable things a tech team can do isn’t just building products, it’s building support systems for the people behind those products. At Eislett Technologies Limited, we take this to heart. Our IT and engineering teams don’t operate in isolation - we constantly look for ways to empower other departments through smarter tools and automation. A great example is our Education Department, which powers one of our key products. They work daily with vast sets of curriculum data, assessments, and question banks. Rather than leaving them to manually input or update content, our tech team built internal automations and scripts that seamlessly populate databases directly from the spreadsheets they already work in. Even better - our internal admin portal allows them to create, edit, and manage content effortlessly, with changes reflected instantly across the system. This collaboration isn’t just about convenience - it’s about alignment. When technology is built to serve the workflow, it transforms productivity, reduces friction, and lets every team focus on what they do best. At Eislett, we believe that’s what modern IT should be about: not just maintaining systems, but continuously asking - 👉 How can we make your work easier, faster, and smarter? #Teamwork #Automation #Engineering #EducationTechnology #Eislett #ProcessOptimization #DigitalTransformation

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