![EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/EON-Co-Founders_Horizontal_Philip-Cheung.jpg?resize=1200%2C898&ssl=1 "EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive")
EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with $10.75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”
Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with $10.75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”
Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK")
![This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK](https://i0.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DM9A2852.jpg?w=680&ssl=1 "This former notorious red-light district is now one of the world’s top AI hubs | TechCrunch
What every U.K. AI startup wants to know these days is, how can I get office space in King’s Cross?
The area is so hot that a VC firm allegedly recently won a deal by promising a founder office space in the neighborhood. “We stop at nothing to win deals [for] and to support” founders, “including helping them source office space when needed,” the firm told me when asked about the rumor, declining to confirm or deny any details.
The neighborhood’s popularity began back in 2016 when DeepMind — then newly acquired by Google — moved in. Soon after, a flood of AI startups followed, wanting to be around the Google DeepMind magic. Today, they hope to take advantage of the cluster of AI talent there.
This has transformed King’s Cross into one of the world’s top AI hubs, rivaled only by San Francisco and Beijing. Around London, it’s known by the sobriquet “Knowledge Quarter,” as it’s home to names like OpenAI, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Cusp AI, Wayne, Recursive, and, a little farther down the road, Synthesia and Anthropic. The European Technology Network (ETN) just moved into a glossy new office nearby, while University College London sits around the corner.
Mixed in with the new developments are trendy food spots like Hoppers and BAO. Hop a train from King’s Cross, and founders can be in Cambridge in 45 minutes to source talent or can be in Paris in two hours to strike a deal.
Who would have guessed that a little more than 20 years ago, this was one of the seediest areas in London?
“In the ’80s, crack and heroin made the area a major narcotics market,” Hussein Kanji, an investor at Hoxton Ventures, said, recalling syringes in tree trunks and gangs patrolling the streets. “In 1982, the local church was occupied by the English Collective of Prostitutes for 12 straight days.” Then, in the early 2000s, a real estate developer had a dream and, well, “now it is the AI hotbed of the United Kingdom,” Kanji said. “What a change.” Around 18 months ago, his portfolio company BioCorteX moved from the neighborhood Holborn to the Jellicoe building in King’s Cross, hoping to be near the action. “Lots going on in London right now,” Nik Sharma, co-founder of BioCorteX, told me. “Lots of hyperscalers moving in.” That includes, reportedly, Jeff Bezos’ AI company Prometheus, which is also said to be in talks to move into the Jellicoe.
There are around 3,600 AI startups in London, which, together, have raised around .1 billion out of the .8 billion raised in the city since late July, according to Dealroom. Since the start of June, AI-related startups have leased more than 1 million square feet of office space in London, according to the real estate firm Knight Frank. With that, prime rents in King’s Cross have risen 18% over the past three years, Chris Dunn, a commercial insight associate at the firm, told me. That percentage represents only the largest leases encompassing at least 10,000 square feet, like the ones OpenAI and Prometheus are signing. The shorter deals go for even more, he said, and now the vacancy rate for conventional office space is just 0.9%. “Demand has outstripped supply,” he continued.
Today, one of the big topics of the area is sovereignty. It was a wake-up call for many when Anthropic shut off access to Mythos and Fable this summer, leaving some in the ecosystem to conclude: “We’d better look after ourselves,” Saul Klein, co-founder of the VC firm Phoenix Court, told me.
Phoenix Court is located in the King’s Cross area and has three portfolio companies in the vicinity, including Olix (which just announced a .3 billion valuation), Early Health and CoMind. Robin Klein, co-founder of the firm, said the shutdown of Fable and Mythos access was a “small but sharp reminder that Europe can’t simply rent its AI capabilities and capacity; it needs to build and hold some of its own.” King’s Cross, he said, is where much of this building is actually happening.
“The bigger question,” he continued, “is whether the U.K. builds the infrastructure, compute, energy, capital, to make this self-reliance durable, rather than just hosting outposts of U.S. labs.”
Image Credits:Phoenix Court
Top founders want to stay
Simon Kohl, founder of Latent Labs, has offices in King’s Cross and San Francisco. The London office, at the moment, is growing faster, and he’s more bullish than ever on the ecosystem, he said. “The mood right now feels less like London trying to catch up and more like London becoming one of the default places to start a serious AI company,” he said. Look around and you are likely to see Wayve testing its autonomous cars. Founded in 2017 by co-founder Alex Kendall, the unicorn is one of London’s biggest success stories.
“Ten years ago, building a frontier AI company from London felt like an unusual choice,” Kendall told me. “Now it feels like an obvious one.” Wayve moved into King’s Cross in 2018 looking for a space that could double as a garage — “a rare combination in Central London,” Kendall said. He has watched the ecosystem mature around him — and it’s now evident that a startup can stay in London, raise serious capital, hire world-class AI talent, and remain globally competitive, he said. Down the street from Anthropic’s new 158,000-square-foot office is the AI agent builder Sierra and the AI video platform Synthesia.
Laura Gonzalez Florez, Synthesia’s chief of staff and head of people, says the company moved into its glossy new office building a year ago to accommodate its growing team. They were drawn to the area for the same reason as everyone else: “It’s very close to the airport … very close to where a lot of investors are,” she said.
Image Credits:Synthesia
Around two-thirds of Synthesia’s engineers are remote, Gonzalez Florez said, letting the company tap into an affordable, international, and diverse talent pool and helping it scale faster. “From London, we can hire and work, without any problem, people from anywhere, from Slovenia to Portugal,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, London’s AI boom is also causing a talent war.U.K. AI job postings have skyrocketed in the past few years, per data from PwC. When Anthropic announced it moved into town earlier this year, it listed, for example, a salary range of £260,000 to £630,000 for a machine learning research engineer when the average salary in London for the same role is around £102,000. Some founders in the U.K., like those in Silicon Valley, are being forced to raise more and bigger rounds to keep up.
“The real test is whether more globally significant AI companies are founded, funded, and scaled from the U.K., while continuing to attract the world’s best talent to build them here,” Zain Ali, founder of the King’s Cross-based AI legal firm Centuro, told me. “If that continues to happen, King’s Cross won’t just be an AI hub. It’ll become one of the U.K.’s most important strategic assets.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#Thisformernotorious #redlight #districtis #nowone #worlds #top #hubs #TechCrunchUK")
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