Scotland’s only listing in our top 10 of AI companies is a giant of the biotech space, having successfully floated with £299m raised. Exscientia uses artificial intelligence to design millions of potential small molecule drugs. It then uses this data to predict their potency and effects, providing indications of which molecules are most likely to make successful drugs.
Before the University of Dundee spinout exited, it had raised £300m in equity across seven rounds, and received three grants worth £5.40m — the first from Horizon 2020 as part of the vaccine development push for COVID-19, with two subsequent grants coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Multiverse has developed a software platform that delivers training and upskilling content to subscribers — including the Multiverse AI Academy — with the aim of closing the skill gap within businesses. The company also facilitates the matching of employers with apprentices.
As of January 2025, the company has raised £318m in equity, acquiring two companies along the way in Eduflow and Searchlight. Participants in Multiverse’s raises have included UK-based Index Ventures and StepStone Group, along with a host of US venture capital firms such as GV (Google Ventures) and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight) is a commercial platform for the travel and hospitality industry, providing advanced revenue management solutions to over 70,000 hotels across 185 countries. The company specialises in transforming complex data into actionable insights, enabling hotels to optimise pricing, promotions, and distribution strategies.
Based in Southwark, this travel and hospitality company has now raised a total of £378m through seven funding rounds. The company has featured on three high-growth lists including the FT1000 and the Fast Track tech 100.
Thought Machine is a London-based fintech company founded in 2014 by Paul Taylor, a former Google engineer. The company specialises in developing cloud-native core banking and payments platforms designed to help banks modernise their infrastructure and deliver innovative financial products. This includes integration with AI tools.
This fintech company attended the Mayor’s International Business Programme, and has now featured on nine high-growth lists. Most recently, it featured on the FT1000 and the BusinessCloud FinTech 50 both in 2024.
Quantexa is a cybersecurity firm that develops AI technology to secure organisations’ data and flag illegal activity. It works closely with industries that handle large datasets (such as banking, e-commerce, and the public sector) to create analytical models that uncover data risk, reveal opportunities, and enhance decision making.
The company is backed by AlbionVC, Dawn Capital, HSBC Enterprise Fund, and Accenture, among others. In its latest funding round, Quantexa raised £137m in investment. This took the company’s total fundraisings to £421m.
Quantexa has attended both the Microsoft ScaleUp accelerator and Tech Nation’s Future Fifty accelerator. It has also appeared on 14 high-growth lists, including The Telegraph’s Tech Hot 100, Fast Track’s Tech Track 100, InsurTech 100, and more recently, the 2024 editions of the Lazard T100 European Venture Growth Index and JP Morgan Top 200 Women-Powered Businesses.
Isomorphic Labs is creating an AI-first platform designed to accelerate the drug discovery process. By integrating cutting-edge machine learning techniques, the company seeks to identify promising drug candidates across various disease areas more efficiently than traditional methods. The approach involves modeling cellular processes to predict molecular interactions with high accuracy, thereby reducing the reliance on time-consuming wet lab experiments.
The company, which spun out from Google, has been through just one funding round, but raised a huge £464m. The funding came from Alphabet, Google Ventures and Thrive Capital. The investment round was designed to fund the company’s AI research and development.
Cera administers homecare, telehealth consultations, and prescription services, managed through a mobile app. This enables users to book appointments with nurses on demand. The app, which uses data analytics and machine learning, is designed to improve healthcare services and health outcomes for its users.
To date, the company has secured £479m through eight rounds of fundraising and in August 2022, it raised £81.3m to increase its capacity to help more patients. Participants in this round included 8090 Partners, Evolve Healthcare Partners, Guinness Ventures, and Jane Street, amongst others. The company has attended DigitalHealth.London Accelerator, PwC Scale Programmes, and Govstart.
Since then the company has secured a further £133m through a combined equity and loan funding round.
Graphcore operates in the semiconductor processing chip industry, developing and manufacturing chips made specifically to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks. Graphcore’s chips use Intelligence Process Unit (IPU) technology, housing 1,472 separate IPU-Cores, capable of executing 8,832 separate parallel computing threads.
The City of London-based AI startup has a total of eight funding rounds under its belt, which saw it raise over half a billion pounds and reach unicorn status after just four years of trading.
Since then, Graphcore faced some challenges in the market and recently exited following an acquisition by SoftBank for £462m. It remains trading under the Graphcore name and is partnered with large tech companies such as Microsoft and Dell Technologies. The company, which has offices in London, Cambridge, Oslo, Beijing, Seoul, and across the US, takes the third spot on our list.
OneTrust is a leading software company specialising in privacy, security, and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions. Founded in 2016 by Kabir Barday, OneTrust provides a comprehensive platform designed to help businesses manage complex regulatory requirements across various sectors and jurisdictions — including the responsible development of AI products.
The company raised a total of £699m, and acquired four companies, before moving abroad to the US. It has also featured on four high-growth lists, including the RegTech 100, the Deloitte Fast 50, and the ProcureTech100.
Wayve burst onto the scene in February 2024, following a huge £822m raise from backers Nvidia, Softbank Group, M12, and Eclipse Ventures, achieving a pre-money valuation of £1.40b and a post-money valuation of £2.22b.
The company — which develops software for self-driving cars using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology — became a unicorn overnight and is now one of the most influential UK players in the AI and self-driving automotive spaces.
Wayve has also attracted three grants totalling £3.36m, awarded by InnovateUK and the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV).
