Startup Raises $10.25M to Compete with NVIDIA
An unnamed startup aiming to challenge NVIDIA's dominance in AI data centers has raised $10.25 million. The company intends to develop alternative hardware and software solutions for large-scale enterprise AI workloads. The funding reflects growing market demand for more cost-effective and competitive compute options.
The London-based startup is named Callosum, founded by Cambridge neuroscientists Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg. Both founders have backgrounds that intersect AI, computing, and brain science, with research published in Nature journals and collaborations with Google DeepMind and Intel. Their core thesis is that intelligence emerges from diverse systems working together, not from scaling a single model on homogenous hardware. Callosum is developing "systems-level software" to orchestrate and schedule AI workloads across a variety of different chip architectures. The platform is designed to work with hardware from NVIDIA, AMD, AWS (Trainium/Inferentia), Cerebras, and SambaNova, enabling multi-cloud and multi-chip infrastructures. The goal is to exploit hardware diversity as an advantage, rather than treating it as a management problem. The company claims its approach can deliver significant performance gains on complex, heterogeneous tasks. For workloads like autonomous computer use, Callosum reports its system can achieve twice the accuracy, seven times the speed, and four times the cost savings compared to "monoculture GPU setups". This is aimed at making large-scale AI more economically viable and less dependent on a single hardware vendor. The $10.25 million funding round was led by Plural, a European VC fund established by experienced tech founders from companies like Wise and Songkick, which focuses on early-stage "deep tech". The firm's partners aim to be hands-on investors, leveraging their operational experience. This model contrasts with traditional VC firms, as only about 8% of European VCs have backgrounds as company operators. Angel investors in the round have deep semiconductor and AI experience. Stan Boland co-founded and led two UK semiconductor startups, Element 14 and Icera, which were acquired by Broadcom and NVIDIA respectively. Charlie Songhurst is a prolific angel investor and former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft, where he was involved in the acquisitions of Skype and Yahoo. Sir John Lazar is the president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and former CEO of Metaswitch, which was acquired by Microsoft. Callosum is also supported by the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). ARIA is backing a £50 million "Scaling Inference Lab," a government-backed testbed for emerging compute technologies. This provides Callosum with a neutral environment to benchmark and prove its software on new types of AI hardware, helping to de-risk the technology for potential enterprise customers.
