Plural

Plural is an early-stage investment fund for the most ambitious founders on a mission to change the world through technology.

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

1/ Huge milestone for Oriole Networks today as they announce a collaboration with AMD to pair AMD's GPUs with Oriole's PRISM photonic networking architecture

[Seb Johnson @SebJohnsonUK]

An INSANELY cool UK AI startup founded by an ex-DeepMinder has just announced a $50m Series B.

This is the coolest, most under-the-radar UK AI company I've come across.

It designs, engineers and manufacturers physical infrastructure, using AI to accelerate how new technologies are discovered and brought to market.

Its first use case is AI data centres where it has already had a breakthrough with cooling fluid and signed a multiple year deal with AWS.

The team behind it are absolutely CRACKED:

> Jonathan Godwin (@jgodwin_ai): AI researcher who spent five years at DeepMind working on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design

> James Gin-Pollock (@gin_james): A repeat AI founder who previously sold a company to Shutterstock

> Daniel Miodovnik (@Dmiodovnik): Worked across finance, government AI and advisory work to the UN

Today the company - @Orbital_Ind, has announced a $50m Series B led by @soundboy of @pluralpl.

VERY COOL

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

1/ I'm really excited to share that Plural is leading @Orbital_Ind's $50m Series B round

Orbital is using AI to discover and design novel compounds from the atoms up, then engineering the products that exploit them directly.

[Danyal Akarca @DanAkarca]

@CallosumAI is hiring in London!

We're building the infrastructure for heterogeneous compute - making many models, on many chips, behave as a single coherent, co-evolving system.

Five MTS roles open across the AI infra stack. Link below!

[Andrew Seddon @seddonandrew]

https://t.co/FJH0h0MnYT

[Sten Tamkivi @seikatsu]

Physical, not purely digital products are solving some of society's biggest problems. And printed circuit boards (PCBs) are vital for building pretty much every bit of electronics-driven hardware you can imagine. That's a supply chain that has drifted away from most Western countries...

[etn. @etnshow]

UK based Rivan Industries just raised a $34,000,000 Series A to scale Europe's largest synthetic gas plant.

CEO & Founder Harvey Hodd (@harveyhodd) discusses the growing viability of synthetic fuels to create a sustainable Earth:

"If we're to make life sustainable on Earth, we need to capture gigatons of carbon. To do that, we need a profitable mechanism".

"20% of the world's energy you can't electrify. So, we're going to have to create trillions of dollars of synthetic fuels at some point and we're going to have to do so very, very cheaply".

"The thing that's changed over the last few years that makes that a viable reality is that energy cost or electricity cost has plummeted".

"Suddenly for the first time in history you can get very, very, very cheap electrons you can use them for very energy intensive processes... anything where a large percentage of overall cost base is energy".

[Finn Murphy @FinnMurphy12]

The UK in 2050. If you listen to the SF bubble you'd think it's well on the way to being a failed state.

But things are cooking and Britannia won't go gentle into the night. @matthewclifford & @soundboy think there is no branch of the tech tree from which the UK could not plausibly produce the next trillion-dollar company.

On this episode of Forecast 2050 Matt, the cofounder of @join_ef and Ian, co-founder of @pluralplatform we talk about what Britain's resurgence could look like over the next 25 years.

- Europe's risk aversion is a bigger threat than American superiority.
- Career politicians won’t survive in the new multipolar world.
- Why the pro-growth movement is losing the culture war — and how to win it back.
- How Britain could win the AI Age by 2050.

https://t.co/tFtAAUB5ST

[taavet hinrikus @taavet]

1/ I’m excited to share that @pluralplatform is doubling down on @Rivanindustries as part of its $34m Series A, led by the excellent team at @IQ_Capital_Fund

[etn. @etnshow]

Metaview (@MetaviewAI) has raised a total of $51M from investors like Google Ventures (@GVteam), Plural (@pluralplatform), Village Global (@villageglobal) and Seedcamp (@seedcamp).

Co-Founders Siadhal (@smagos) and Shahriar (@s16h_ ) previously worked at Uber and Palantir.

Here @smagos outlines why Metaview exists and what the mission is:

[🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 @front_ukrainian]

❗️🇺🇦Ukrainian military personnel from the Inquisition Battalion are using 🇩🇪German kamikaze drones HF-1 and HX-2 from the company Helsing to strike 🇷🇺Russian targets on the front line.

[Plural @pluralplatform]

An elite generation of founders are solving the world’s hardest problems and building the technologies that will shape Europe’s future across our most critical industries. The crux of Plural's founding thesis is starting to play out: non-obvious, hard companies matter.

[Frankenburg Technologies @FrankenburgTech]

Frankenburg joins UK defence leaders reinforcing Gulf air defence under Iranian attacks

“We’ve put a huge amount of work into this – long hours, hard engineering, constant iteration – because our partners need a new kind of system: one that can be produced quickly, replenished continuously, and used at scale without breaking budgets when they’re under attack.
That’s what we’re building together with our UK team and partners across the UK and the Middle East.”
— Dan Hallett, UK Director, Frankenburg

Frankenburg is part of a select group of UK defence companies working with government and regional partners to support Gulf states under sustained drone and missile attacks.

Our Mark I is the world’s smallest and lowest-cost guided interceptor missile, built from commercially available components and engineered for localised, sovereign mass production. It is designed to cut intercept costs by more than tenfold and to be produced locally at the point of need.

UK government press release: https://t.co/QuTecFLeBL

#WinTech

[Khaled Helioui @KHelioui]

1. @pluralplatform is leading a $15m seed round into Augur, applying advanced AI to support national security, protect public spaces and safeguard critical national infrastructure.

[Plural @pluralplatform]

Excellent analysis in @TheEconomist on why the next trillion dollar company just might come from Europe:
https://t.co/bpcDZLljgD

[Callosum @CallosumAI]

Today we launched @CallosumAI.

We are building the infrastructure where heterogeneous chips & intelligence co-evolve to solve the world's hardest problems.

Today we present our first results.

Across four large problem spaces, we break SOTA and deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in capabilities, cost and speed: 12× cheaper deep context. New web SOTA with open-source, 3x cheaper and faster. 2.4× cache speedups. 1,767× faster tool calling. This is the worst our infrastructure will ever be.

We do it by co-evolving heterogeneous chips and multi-agent intelligence - workflows aware of their hardware, models aware of their task graph, kernels aware of their output constraints. An Intelligent System.
https://t.co/t0KiP6q3eJ

[Kristen Michal @KristenMichalPM]

Through SmartCap, Estonia invests in the next generation of defence innovation.

Frankenburg’s 30 million euro Series A, led by Plural and joined by SmartCap, is not just a funding round. It is a strategic signal. Security is moving fast. Standing still is not an option.

In modern defence, speed, scale and affordability decide. Europe must back those who build, adapt and deliver.

Estonia will continue to do so:

https://t.co/IB9kjN6a7N

[Danyal Akarca @DanAkarca]

Today we're launching @CallosumAI out of stealth. I’m incredibly excited.

We think AI & compute is about to change fundamentally.

The current paradigm scaled up on an assumption that single models on identical chips would be enough. That shaped everything - models, data centres, the entire compute stack. It's taken us remarkably far. But what started as a practical bet has hardened into constraints now holding us back.

The problems we need AI to solve - in science, industry, security - won't be solved by a single form of intelligence. They'll be solved by many. Intelligence is heterogeneous. Biology figured this out long ago. AI infrastructure hasn't caught up.

At the same time, amazing new chips are arriving from every direction, each with radically different strengths. But every layer of the stack above them was built for homogeneity. But there is no infrastructure to compose diverse hardware and AI into Intelligent Systems that are greater than the sum of their parts.

That's why Jascha Achterberg and I founded Callosum.

Callosum is the Intelligent Systems Company. We are building the infrastructure where heterogeneous chips & intelligence co-evolve to solve the world's hardest problems.

Our ambition is to open an entirely new paradigm, where diverse chips create algorithmic possibilities that didn't exist before, and new architectures reveal new ways to exploit the hardware.

We've raised $10.25 million. Pre-seed led by @pluralplatform and @soundboy , with 22 world-class investors including @join_ef, Charlie Songhurst, @nickmckeown1, @stanboland, @LawrenceLundy & supported by @ARIA_research. We've assembled an extraordinary team. I'm in awe of the people around me every day.

Read about us in @FortuneMagazine: https://t.co/eypQtAgXZ1

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

1/ Today, @pluralplatform is investing $10.25m into @CallosumAI, a startup building a new class of company to enable more diverse, powerful and efficient compute, unlocking entirely new kinds of AI systems and discoveries that today’s hardware paradigm will never deliver.

[Sten Tamkivi @seikatsu]

I find it really appropriate to announce today that @pluralplatform is leading a €30m Series A into @FrankenburgTech, along with our friends at Smartcap, to develop missile defence systems that make sense in today’s era of unmanned warfare,