By Jeremy Kahn
Publication Date: 2026-02-26 05:01:00
A London-based startup founded by two Cambridge-trained neuroscientists has raised $10.25 million for their startup Callosum, which is building software that orchestrates AI workloads across a mix of different chip types—challenging the industry’s dependence on running ever-bigger models on banks of identical Nvidia GPUs.
The company also announced it is receiving research funding from the U.K. government which is looking for ways to build so-called “sovereign cloud” infrastructure for AI that would be independent, or at least not solely reliant, on U.S. technology providers.
Callosum cofounders Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, who met during their PhDs at Cambridge around 2019, have software that can distribute AI tasks across chips from different manufacturers—be it Nvidia GPUs, AMD processors, Amazon Web Services’ custom Trainium and Inferentia silicon, or newer designs from startups like Cerebras and SambaNova—extracting performance advantages from each.
The funding round was led by Plural, the European early-stage venture fund co-founded by Wise’s Taavet Hinrikus and Ian Hogarth, who also served as the first chair of the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute. Angel investors including Charlie Songhurst, Stan Boland of FiveAI, and John Lazar of the Royal Academy of Engineering also participated. Separately, the U.K. government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is providing grant funding to the company to accelerate R&D on…
