Callosum, a startup based in London, has successfully secured $10.25 million in funding to develop its innovative software that manages AI workloads across various chip types. The funding round was led by Plural, a venture fund co-founded by Taavet Hinrikus and Ian Hogarth, with participation from notable angel investors such as Charlie Songhurst and Stan Boland.
The U.K. government is also backing Callosum's efforts, providing research funding aimed at establishing a sovereign cloud infrastructure for AI that reduces dependence on U.S. technology. This initiative includes grant funding from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) to support the integration of novel chip technologies into Callosum's platform.
Co-founders Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, who met during their doctoral studies at Cambridge in 2019, have designed software capable of distributing AI tasks across diverse hardware, including Nvidia GPUs, AMD processors, and custom silicon from Amazon Web Services. Their approach challenges the prevailing industry trend of relying solely on large-scale models running on identical systems, advocating for a more diversified method akin to the workings of the human brain.