Callosum, an AI infrastructure startup, has raised £7.5 million in funding led by Plural, supported by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), with participation from angel investors including Charlie Songhurst, Stan Boland and John Lazar. It is transforming how AI models are combined and run to solve hard real-world problems. The funding will be used to expand the team, scale its software and source compute resources to accelerate development of sovereign AI infrastructure.
Its systems-level software enables many different models to work together across diverse chip architectures, orchestrating components so they interact, communicate and collaborate rather than forcing tasks onto identical hardware. By extracting performance benefits from different chip types and optimising each for specific tasks, the platform reduces dependence on any single provider and supports complex real-world workloads such as autonomous computer use.
The technology also enables multi-cloud and multi-chip infrastructure, working with cloud partners including AWS, Google and Microsoft. Support from ARIA is intended to unlock new capabilities in data centres with mixed-chip infrastructure, contributing to UK AI sovereignty while maintaining a global, multi-cloud approach.
Callosum was founded by Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, who met during their PhDs at Cambridge working on the intersection of the brain, computing and AI. Their research has been published in several Nature journals, and they have worked at organisations including Intel and collaborated with Google DeepMind.
Big labs are currently betting that one model will rule them all. We think that's wrong and our work proves this. Nature shows that real intelligence emerges from many systems working together. We’ve brought together incredible talent to enable a paradigm shift in how we build intelligent systems to solve real-world problems, with the infrastructure to make that possible, on any chip, anywhere in the world.
Everyone assumed chip diversity was a disadvantage to be managed. We saw the opposite, that it's an advantage to be exploited. We're not optimising one algorithm on top of the existing stack. We're using software to control all the levers across the entire system, extracting benefits from diversity that others dismiss. Plural understands this mission and we're excited to build alongside them.
Danyal and Jascha have been published in several Nature journals and worked with some of the most prestigious AI and compute organisations in the world. Now they’ve built an incredible team to define and commercialise entirely new ground. Their vision for a multi-model, multi-chip future could be transformative and positions them to compete with the world’s biggest chip and model makers. These are serious founders tackling a serious mission, which is exactly what we look for at Plural.
