While funding may be scarce for some, Europe’s fastest-growing startups still have their pick.
The latest beneficiary of that investor appetite is Finom, a five-year-old, Amsterdam-based challenger bank that targets small and medium-size businesses across Europe. The company, which claims to have doubled its revenue in 2024, just closed a €115 million Series C equity round (around $133 million), TechCrunch learned exclusively. This comes only a few weeks after it landed $105 million in growth funding from General Catalyst, its backer since 2021.
Finom’s business model centers on providing European SMBs with a financial platform that combines banking, invoicing, and a growing range of features, including AI-enabled accounting. “Because theoretically, entrepreneurs don’t need to have an accountant at all,” said CEO Andrey Petrov (on the far left in the picture).
The startup’s ambitious growth targets reflect this vision. While Petrov says Finom’s goal of having one million business customers by the end of 2026 is motivational and not set in stone, its new funding makes that target slightly more attainable.
This belief that Finom could serve a fair share of Europe’s 26 million SMBs is also reflected in its Series C. The round was led by AVP (formerly AXA Venture Partners), with participation from new investor Headline (formerly e.ventures) through Headline Growth. Existing investors Cogito Capital, General Catalyst, and Northzone also joined the round.
Despite this momentum, the startup may find it easier to win clients over from legacy banks — its current plan — than from other fintechs.
Even after its Series C brought its total funding to roughly $346 million, Finom has far less external capital than Monzo, N26, Revolut, or Wise, which all raised more than $1 billion. Its funding to date is more comparable to the approximately $700 million raised by Finom’s closest peer, French unicorn Qonto — though the comparison isn’t perfect.
What makes Finom’s funding structure particularly interesting is its non-traditional component. Unlike typical VCs, General Catalyst took no equity in Finom with its non-traditional round; the capital from its Customer Value Fund (CVF) can only be used for growth, which is how it plans to get its money back.
Combined with the Series B, this non-traditional funding round would have been enough for the Dutch company to reach profitability, according to chairman and co-founder Kos Stiskin (on the far right in the picture). But Finom was also hoping to raise equity by the end of the year, and get a “good and nice” new valuation in the process. What it didn’t anticipate was closing both deals so close to each other.
“One took longer than expected, and one was much faster than expected,” Stiskin told TechCrunch. He declined to disclose the updated valuation, stating only that it is twice the (also undisclosed) valuation associated with its 2024 $54 million Series B.
The timing may have worked in Finom’s favor. Since the company doesn’t publicize its unit economics — apart from its user base of 125,000 — the fact that General Catalyst took a look under the hood likely helped boost interest and speed up the funding. That vote of confidence — and its direct interest in recouping its money — may have been the signal that got investors to hurry up and write checks.
Beyond the signaling effects, getting the Customer Value Fund to finance Finom’s marketing efforts without giving up equity may seem like a good deal for its Series C backers — which include General Catalyst itself.
However, the Series C will also fund riskier efforts than customer acquisition through marketing.
According to Petrov, one of its uses could be strategic, opportunistic acquisitions that would allow it to expand either its customer base or its product portfolio. That represents a shift in strategy, given that Finom has only acquired one company so far — in 2022, when it purchased Kapaga, a British cross-border payment service when Finom was considering expanding into the U.K.
Since then, Finom has shifted its focus to some of Europe’s largest markets, where it sees greater opportunity than in the U.K. The company believes these markets have fewer challenger banks competing for SMBs and that traditional banks are doing a poor job serving small businesses.
Like many neobanks, however, it only operates with an electronic money institution (EMI) license in most of its main markets: the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Spain (though not Germany, where it partnered with Solaris, which has a full banking license).
Despite these licensing limitations, it was able to add lending in the Netherlands, which it sees as a testing ground for its credit offering — something Petrov sees as a must-have for any fintech and for business customers.
This lending initiative is also in line with Finom’s efforts to expand its product line both horizontally — with deposits and loans — and vertically, “starting from a banking account and ending in paying taxes, reports, and everything.” AI is involved as well, and not just on the product side.
The company is also leveraging AI internally. With a team of 500, it expects to make some business- and tech-related hires, though not so much to scale its operations. “We’re adding some people, but mostly we’re adding new types of AI agents to work with internally,” Petrov said. “So we are hiring less than we need, and we see good output in terms of using AI and AI agents to automate part of [our] routine tasks.”
Finom’s leadership structure has also evolved. The split of duties between Finom’s four co-founders has gone through some changes over the years, with Petrov now the sole CEO — a role he once shared with Yakov Novikov, who is now an advisor alongside Oleg Laguta.
The three of them previously created Russian digital bank Modulbank. But this time, Finom’s focus is on Europe and its entrepreneurs who are, in Stiskin’s words, “the backbone of the European Union economy.”
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#SMBfocused #Finom #closes #115M #European #fintech #heats
![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.”
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