Investor seeks AI Adonis

British startups have already attracted more than $26bn of venture capital this year, almost matching the pandemic-era peak, much of it from American investors. At the same time PitchBook data show that since 2023 the total value of UK VC deals has risen while their number has fallen. In the first half of 2026 nearly three-quarters of investment went into AI startups, much of it to a small cohort of companies; fintech, once a darling, is struggling by contrast. James Wise of Balderton notes that AI has made analysing startups far faster. On 4 November Sequoia Capital said it would close its London office to focus on Silicon Valley. The article says a British firm may never match the returns early Anthropic investors are likely to receive when that lab goes public, but that London remains a good place for smaller bets thanks to its research base and DeepMind. The emblematic cheque is David Silver, who left DeepMind to co-found Ineffable Intelligence, a new frontier lab, and raised $1.1bn within months, a British record for a seed round. Other “AI Adonises” named include Demis Hassabis’s Isomorphic Labs, and Nscale, a data-centre provider led by Josh Payne and backed by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and former Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg. Steven Richardson’s AI startup was recently valued at $400m based on, publicly at least, a single word on a website (“investigate”) and his record founding and selling Riven; Chad Edwards is already on his second billion-dollar company, Cusp AI, which plans to use AI to discover materials and is backed by Jeff Bezos. A Beauhurst report found investment into university spinouts raising money for the first time fell by more than two-thirds in the first half of 2026, though Jonno Evans of IQ Capital says the most exciting startups can still be founded by academics, “but very often they’re not.” Liquidation preferences are now as founder-friendly in Britain as in America, according to Jamie Moore of Orrick. The piece’s counterweight is founder pushback: Revolut’s Nik Storonsky described VCs as “cheerleaders” after one tried to fire a top performer, and started his own fund, QuantumLight, to compete with them. Saul Klein of Phoenix Court says VCs will have to become more useful to founders or be jilted.