Last week, Liz Kendall and AI Minister Kanishka Narayan launched the UK's Sovereign AI Unit at Wayve's King's Cross office, alongside chair James Wise from Balderton. It sits inside DSIT with a £500m allocation and is designed to behave more like a VC fund than a typical government scheme. Alongside it, the government opened an £80m procurement round offering contracts of up to £5m over 12 to 24 months.

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What is it?

SovAI is a government investment unit that takes equity stakes in businesses on commercial terms. The taxpayer is effectively the limited partner, and the expectation is that these investments generate returns.

SovAI’s equity investments are capped at £20m, so the Unit will back roughly 25 companies in total. Sitting alongside it is a £282m R&D pot, with an initial £9m call for AI datasets already open.

The Unit is offering a bundled package including:

• Up to 1 million GPU hours on UK supercomputers
• Visa decisions within a day, plus 10 free visas
• A route into government as a customer
• Access to the £282m R&D pot
• Help navigating regulation and setting up in the UK

The procurement model allows companies to retain their IP, with the government only having usage rights.

The first cohort includes Callosum, Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio and Odyssey. Around 30 more companies are in the pipeline.

What can it offer to firms?

There are three main routes:

• Equity investment: Companies can receive direct investment from SovAI, with cheques of up to £20m. These are made on commercial terms and may include a right of first refusal on future funding rounds. This is a new source of equity funding on commercial terms, particularly for AI-native companies at early and growth stages
• Procurement contracts: The £80m procurement round offers contracts of up to £5m over 12-24 months. Companies retain IP and grant government usage rights, providing a route to revenue and public sector deployment. This is a clearer procurement route with more founder-friendly IP terms
• Compute and support package: Companies can access compute (up to 1 million GPU hours), visas, R&D funding and regulatory support as part of the overall offer. Initial access has already been granted to the first cohort, with further allocations expected as the pipeline progresses. This allows for access to large-scale UK-based compute capacity without needing to secure it privately

For Boardwave members, SovAI creates a more direct route into three areas that are typically harder to access. It may also influence decisions around where to base teams, how to structure funding rounds, and how to engage with the public sector.

To find out more about how your organisation could benefit from SovAI, you can inquire here or please get in touch with us at boardwave@inflect.co.uk to find out more.

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