Funding raised by UK tech companies in January reached a six-month high, brought on by a surge in AI investments, fresh figures from UKTN have found.
Across January, UKTN tracked £794.3m worth of funding rounds for British tech firms, almost double the average amount raised across the previous six months (£433.7m).
The encouraging numbers were heavily driven by major funding rounds in the generative AI sector, with the record for British generative AI valuations broken twice in the same month.
AI avatar company Synthesia closed a £146m Series D round on 15 January at a valuation of $2.1bn then, two weeks later, AI voice cloning firm ElevenLabs closed a Series C round of the same size that valued it at $3.3bn.
January also saw the release of the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, which firmly placed growth in the sector as a top priority for Labour.
The honour of the biggest investment of the month though did not go to an AI firm, instead going to Verdiva Bio, a health tech company developing a rival to Novo Nordisk’s weight loss drug Ozempic, which raised £333.5m in its first-ever round.
The London-based biotech was incorporated in the latter half of last year, exploding onto the scene with an estimated valuation of $2.5bn, a testament to investors’ appetite for weight loss treatments.
UKTN publishes a weekly roundup of funding deals every Friday.
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