Accelerating the AI flywheel across the UK

When Accel opened its London office in 2000, Europe’s technology ecosystem was nascent, and the region was far from an obvious choice to build an on-the-ground team. There wasn’t a unicorn in sight, and VC investment in Europe between 2000 to 2005 was less than $10B (Dealroom).This was a stark contrast to more than  $120B (Dealroom) that had been invested in US startups over the same period. However, our team firmly believed that ambitious founders could come from anywhere. Over the next 25 years, our hypothesis proved correct, and we saw the evolution of the region’s technology landscape into today’s vibrant ecosystem.

While the network effects that Silicon Valley has long benefited from are now at work across multiple European cities —Amsterdam, Berlin, Bucharest, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Tallinn, and more —London was one of the earliest European tech hubs to develop.

The UK itself has a unique tech heritage that has formed strong foundations for what is now one of Europe’s leading tech ecosystems with a world-class talent pool. From Bletchley Park, to the discovery of DNA, to silicon with ARM, and global AI breakthroughs at DeepMind, the UK has been at the forefront of invention. The country has produced the most tech unicorns in Europe and, according to our founder factory report released earlier this year, 44 of these VC-backed unicorns have already fueled 391 additional tech startups across Europe. Around 17,000 VC-backed startups across the UK have a combined market valuation of $1.2T.

And the success is distributed —-‘recycling’’ of talent and capital across the region has meant that the ecosystem is not just about London. Hubs are springing up across the countryUK, and founder factories are fostering new tech startups in cities such as Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Oxford.

The UK’s tech talent flywheel has meant that the foundations of a strong AI ecosystem are firmly in place. The opportunity now is to build on that momentum — to help founders scale faster, create more globally competitive companies, and generate the next wave of AI jobs. Today, we’re excited to collaborate with NVIDIA to do just that. Building on its recent partnership with Nebius for the UK’s first deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, NVIDIA’s £2B investment, infrastructure, and global experience will amplify the work of the UK’s world-class researchers, founders, and universities and help them compete with the best on the global stage.