Stanhope AI, a London-based startup aiming to apply neuroscience principles to create human-like artificial intelligence, has raised £2.3m.
Founded as a spinout of University College London (UCL), Stanhope AI is run by a founding team of neuroscientists and AI researchers who are developing a form of the technology called “agentic AI”.
This is an effort to make a truly human-like thinking machine, capable of making decisions on its own and with limited human supervision.
Large language models (LLMs), which are used to build AI bots like ChatGPT, can create human-like conversations by analysing large amounts of data and reconstructing them into responses.
Stanhope, however, is building algorithms based on the human brain, which is constantly making predictions of what happens next and learning and changing from errors.
According to the company, agentic models learn autonomously by decoding their environments in real time, while LLMs are fed data by developers.
“Our mission at Stanhope AI is to bridge the gap between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, creating a new generation of AI systems that can think, adapt, and decide like humans,” said Prof Rosalyn Moran, CEO and co-founder of Stanhope AI.
“We believe this technology will transform the capabilities of AI and robotics and make them more impactful in real-world scenarios.
The seed funding round was led by UCL Technology Fund, with participation from Creator Fund, MMC Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and Rockmount Capital.
“AI startups may be some of the hottest investments right now but few have the calibre and deep scientific and technical know-how as the Stanhope AI team,” said David Grimm, a partner at UCL Technology Fund.
“This is emblematic of their unique approach, combining neuroscience insights with advanced AI, which presents a groundbreaking opportunity to advance the field and address some of the most challenging problems in AI today. We can’t wait to see what this team achieves.”
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