
Partner @Balderton. Investing in AI, health and energy. Chair of UK Sovereign AI. Author Start-Up Century. Mostly Generative.
United Kingdom
Joined March 2010
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Now that we've cracked Navier-Stokes and flying cars, there is only one true, super-human technological challenge left - lowering British electricity bills.
And Fuse seem to have cracked it! An affordable home battery & solar system which means lower bills and more energy independence at home, and at scale more capacity on the grid.
Hi there Jules, another impressive release from @alanchanguk , @charlesorr and the phenomenal team @fuseenergy.
Meet Jules by Fuse Energy.
An intelligent energy system for your home. Plug in and autopilot does the rest.
It learns your habits, stores power, trades the excess and continuously lowers your bills.
Solar and storage is now for everyone.
Energy intelligently designed for you.
Up to £330 a year off your bills.
Reservations now open
James Wise retweeted
We’re delighted to announce our investment in Augur.
Augur is building technology that can help security teams find information faster and respond sooner, with applications across public safety, serious crime and critical infrastructure.
Augur is already working on capability to prevent attacks by hostile states on Britain’s critical national infrastructure. They’re also partnering with @TfL to help identify and detect sexual offending on the transport network, behaviours that disproportionally impact women and girls.
We’re excited about the potential to help keep people safer, give investigators valuable time back, and spot threats before they become more serious. The Augur team is tackling an incredibly important problem and building the solution here in Britain.
Read our blog below for more information on Augur’s technology.
James Wise retweeted
“okay, so what? it’s just math.”
no, you don't get it.
here’s what OpenAI’s math breakthroughs could eventually help make possible in the real world:
Vlasov–Maxwell → stronger foundations for fusion research, whose ultimate prize is virtually limitless clean energy to power civilization
Calderón’s Problem → portable body scanners using electrical signals, making medical imaging cheaper and easier to access
Maximum-Cardinality Matching → faster searches for compatible kidney swaps across large donor pools, helping hospitals coordinate lifesaving transplants
Inverse Elasticity Problem → scans that map tissue stiffness, helping doctors locate suspicious growths inside the body
Mumford–Shah Conjecture → better tools for spotting tissue changes in brain scans, helping doctors identify signs of disease
Bose–Einstein Condensation → stronger foundations for quantum sensors that could help vehicles navigate without GPS
Simple Stochastic Games → better safety checks for self-driving cars and robots before dangerous mistakes reach the real world
Matrix Multiplication → cheaper AI and bigger scientific simulations using the same computers
Edit Distance → faster DNA comparisons, helping researchers study genetic changes linked to disease
The k-Server Problem → robots that waste less movement and energy, making warehouses more efficient and goods cheaper to move
a reminder that math is the foundation of science.
so accelerating mathematical discovery could compress centuries of scientific progress into years.
insane timeline to be alive for!
We’re releasing a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.
We’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations to inform how we release these results.
github.com/openai/math
James Wise retweeted
Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk.
• 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active.
It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
• State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding.
• Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure.
• Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately.
Open weights release end of October.
🤖 Made with AI
The reports of open-weight’s death have been greatly exaggerated again, it seems.
An astonishing first model release, open-weight and from an 🇺🇸 & 🇬🇧 based team.
Congrats @real_ioannis, @sahnihim and all @reflection_ai.
Introducing Beam: a highly efficient agentic open model with 501B total parameters and 23B active.
- Frontier reasoning efficiency
- Advances the Western open frontier on coding & agentic tasks
- Trained end-to-end from scratch
Full weights release this month.
Learn more about Beam: reflection.ai/beam
A lot in here I agree with:
- The public discussion seems to be mostly on AI hypotheticals. But there are serious and present opportunities and challenges facing the UK today.
- AI capabilities are hard power in the same way our military, energy and infrastructure are, and should be treated as such.
- While Brits should have access to the best services in the world wherever they’re built, we must have more of these capabilities here at home as well to ensure resilience and leverage.
The @UKSovereignAI Unit was set-up with much of this in mind - kind of David to give us a mention, but we’re only a small part of the solution.
The UK government needs to do more to support its own AI companies ft.trib.al/yLImB4V
Some quick ( and free! ) wins here for the Government to look at to support British researchers and engineers.
1/ Today we’re launching an open letter calling on the government to end unfair restrictions that stop Britain’s best switching jobs or starting companies.
UK AI companies that have raised $5bn agree: our best should be free to start and scale. 🧵
@downingstreet @biztradegovuk
Security is the most important frontier.
@balderton, over half the investments I’ve led in the last year have been in cyber. And we should be doing even more.
Great to see ARIA support researchers from day one.
AI-enabled cyber attacks are getting faster + going further. But what if AI-enabled formal methods could make high-assurance cyber defence practical at unprecedented speed + scale? We’re funding eight teams with £22m to test that idea. Meet them here: link.aria.org.uk/SAI-TA2-Cre…
People used to say knowledge is power - at the moment power is knowledge.
My panel with @alexanderrinke on why your grid policy is your AI policy, and what we’re seeing on the ground @Balderton is now up on the HumanX site.
Kind of them to put a massive ‘HUMAN’ sign behind me, just to reassure everyone.
Live in 5!
GM from @HumanXCo in Amsterdam.
Here's the line up:
@stefanweitz (HumanX)
@sjpretorius (WPP)
@Jameswise (Balderton)
Tom Eggemeier (Zendesk)
@wellingmax (CuspAI)
@xdh (Zoom)
@timyoung (Jasper)
@harrymccracken (Fast Company)
@alexgkendall (Wayve)
Hugo da Silva (Morphotonics)
Alex Gay (Otter AI)
Carlos Espinal (Seedcamp)
LIVE NOW
I went to an event with Michael Moritz and Alex Ferguson a few years ago in London - it was one of the most insightful discussions on character I’ve ever heard.
Highly recommend this interview with him below, which captures a lot of it.
My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years.
Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe.
His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people.
We discuss:
- The infamous Steve Jobs profile
- Why Don Valentine hired him
- The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people
- Monomania and the cost of greatness
- Why he has never felt good at anything
- Writing, journalism and AI
- What he learned about himself writing Ausländer
I'd recommend watching this one if you can. Michael was incredibly thoughtful and reflective throughout, particularly when talking about his parents, childhood, and the more difficult parts of his personal story.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:53 Family History & Identity
7:03 Survival & Outsider Instinct
18:53 Studying Exceptional People
33:50 Self-Doubt & Success
41:17 Steve Jobs & Obsession
52:50 Joining Sequoia
1:03:22 Leadership & Alex Ferguson
1:08:25 Elon Musk & AI
1:17:12 Becoming Who You Are
While there’s no requirement to do so we are trying to be as transparent as possible, so in response to ( another! ) FOI @UKSovereignAI added my conflicts of interest process to the site today along with others, for those interested. I hoped we’d put this all up earlier - but sadly I am not the webmaster or else there’d be a lot more gifs.
As a small insight into how difficult it is to do things in Govt, there hasn’t been a SINGLE WEEK since our launch where team members haven’t had to spend hours responding to an FOI request, for things like ‘where are your investment companies based’ ( you can use Google! ) or ‘what copyright laws does a chip company breach’ ( as nonsensical as asking what fruit and veg laws a fighter jet breaches ).
I understand that many FOI requests are now AI generated. But as the civil service isn’t allowed to use AI in the same way to respond to them, the abuse of this system is rife. There was a great piece in the Economist on this asymmetry choking parts of the state recently.
It’s a significant cost of both our small team’s time and tax payers money. So I’m hoping that by releasing more publicly, even if delayed, it will reduce that burden on them.
Thankfully, SovAI has a killer team who work around the clock anyway - more to come on how they’re working to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities and economy next week.
One of the most difficult parts of our job @balderton is trying to forecast the future, and understand how complex events, risks and opportunities are related.
I'm delighted to be backing Ben, Toby and the @_Mantic_AI team to make doing that easier for everyone.
Using Mantic to understand how different events, from interest rate rises to congressional race outcomes are related, feels like having a crystal ball. Learn more about what they're building, and open roles here in the UK & beyond at mantic.com .
Ben & I started Mantic with the mission to solve forecasting.
This summer, Mantic out-predicted all 676 humans in the preeminent forecasting tournament.
We’ve raised $25M to scale.
We’re serving the brave decision-makers who want to grapple with uncertainty.
Join the mission.
Mantic raises $25mn to scale superhuman AI forecasting
And I can highly recommend @ArchieHall’s piece on super forecasting and crystal ball competitions in the @economist this week.
While many journalists in Britain seem to only want to focus on American innovations - it’s nice to have a reporter cover some British ones!
Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters
economist.com/science-and-te…
We’re backing Exein again. As @giacuo says below, the most immediate risk from frontier AI models is cyber breaches. Exein is securing hardware from sophisticated devices to your fridge against these risks.
Secure your chips!
Exein has just become the most valuable cybersecurity startup in Europe after raising $270m.
Founded by @giacuo, @Exein_io builds the security layer for Physical AI.
It just announced $270m raise at a $1.7bn valuation, led by @HeadlineVC .
I spoke to @giacuo on the floor of @NYSE about the round, developing a new physical AI model, and building a global category leader from rome.
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
0:37 Announcing the $270m round
0:51 Why Exein is moving into physical AI
3:57 Running on 2 billion devices
5:27 The growth behind the new valuation
5:53 The trends driving that growth
8:56 Who backed the round
11:49 Expanding into San Francisco
14:14 Why physical AI is the next battlefield
17:50 Building a global business from Rome

















