The company aims to lower AI costs by attaching each task to the model and hardware that best suits it.
Callosum, a UK-founded AI start-up that develops software to match specific AI tasks with the least expensive and most suitable models and chips, has raised $100m in early seed feeding.
The round was backed significantly by the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund and led by venture capital firm Atomico with additional participation from investors Plural and DCVC. The organisation also has a partnership with chipmaker Cerebras Systems and has deals with Rebellions Inc and Axelera AI.
Established in 2025, by two Cambridge University neuroscientists, Danyal Akarca who is the CEO and CTO Jascha Achterberg, Callosum software can direct specific AI tasks towards the models and chips best suited to the activity and financial requirements, as a means of showing that not every company requires high-end, powerful graphic processors or AI strategies.
Callosum was the first investment to be disclosed by the UK’s Sovereign AI fund, which launched in April of this year.
Kanishka Narayan, the UK minister for AI, said, “AI is nothing without the chips that underpin it and the eye-watering demand for them is only going to grow. In the race to develop and use AI, success will depend not just on having access to those chips, but on using them as efficiently as possible.”
In the race to develop the most efficient, cost-effective and powerful chips, a range of organisations globally have invested significant time, money and effort into expanding their capabilities.
This week, UK AI hardware start-up Fractile announced it is in talks to raise funding of roughly $600m at a pre-money valuation of $6.5bn. Fractile aims to enable the scaling of cheaper AI token processing for faster model reasoning.
US AI company Etched raised $700m in a new funding round led by US trading firm Jane Street. The organisation builds inference clusters to make AI inference faster, cheaper and more efficient.
In March of this year, global leader in the AI and chips space Nvidia, announced a new multi-year partnership with Thinking Machines Lab, which will be using Nvidia’s systems to train its AI frontier models.
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