Show Notes 213: Amelia Armour on Why the UK's Moment Has Finally Arrived
It's been three years since Amelia Armour last joined the Cambridge Tech Podcast, and a lot has changed. The Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners is back with a view from the inside of one of Cambridge's longest-standing deep tech investors, and the mood is distinctly optimistic.
From a record-breaking first half of 2026 to the arrival of Silicon Valley capital setting up shop in the UK, this is one of the most data-rich conversations Faye and James have hosted on the state of UK venture.
Amadeus Capital Partners was co-founded 28 years ago by Hermann Hauser and Anne Glover, and has backed some of Cambridge's most significant companies across AI, quantum, novel materials and life sciences. Amelia herself joined in 2009 after training as a chartered accountant at Deloitte and working in investment banking at Barclays and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. She now sits on between six and eight boards at any one time.
Key Talking Points
The state of UK venture in 2026
The first half of 2026 saw $17 billion flow into venture-backed UK companies, the strongest H1 since 2022, driven largely by AI-related mega-rounds
A company spun out of Google DeepMind closed a $1 billion seed round, the largest in European history
Cambridge unicorns are arriving with increasing regularity: Nyobolt and CuspAI are the most recent additions to the list
The British Business Bank is now writing cheques of £100 million plus into individual rounds, including Oxford Quantum Circuits
Where the value sits in AI
Amadeus invests across the full AI stack: hardware (silicon, photonics), middleware and tooling, and applications including PolyAI, the Cambridge-originated voice AI company
The rise of large language models has disrupted the "LLM wrapper" tier of the market, pushing investors further down the stack into IP-rich hardware plays
Companies like Fractile are getting funded on the chip side as the race to compete with NVIDIA intensifies
AI is compressing the innovation cycle: pre-seed rounds are smaller, iteration is faster, and founders are reaching proof-of-concept in a fraction of the time it previously took
"For companies that are the most heavy adopters of AI, they were actually recruiting the most people." — Amelia Armour
The scale-up capital shift
The long-standing complaint that UK startups were forced to sell early before reaching meaningful scale is genuinely changing
Pension fund capital is beginning to move into private assets via the Mansion House Accord, with Nest committing up to 10% into private assets
Playground Global, the Silicon Valley VC firm, is setting up its first non-US office in the UK, backed by a £150 million cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank
The goal: keep returns in the UK as companies scale, rather than seeing them captured by overseas capital
The Amadeus portfolio today
Quantum: Riverlane (just celebrated its 10th anniversary), Nu Quantum, and Photonic Inc. in Canada
Novel materials: Paragraf and Xampla
Life sciences: Constructive Bio, built on research by Professor Jason Chin
Dream additions to the portfolio: a UK photonics company, a UK robotics business (currently backing Stateful at Oxford), and next-generation quantum application companies
Advice for founders raising today
Strong advisors and warm introductions make a significant difference when deal flow is at record levels
Focus beats breadth: investors are wary of companies chasing multiple markets simultaneously in early stage
Non-dilutive funding (grants, EIC, compute credits from hyperscalers) can be transformative; one Amadeus portfolio company turned a £2 million seed into £6 million of runway through grants and credits alone
VC is not right for every business; founders should think carefully before taking on board members and dilution
"Getting the right VC and the right relationships can make a big difference. You don't want tension on the board because the VC and the CEO don't get on." — Amelia Armour
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Hosted by James Parton and Faye Holland. Produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV. Supported by media partner Business Weekly.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast. Talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Fay Holland and James Parton.
I'm Fay. And I'm James. This week, we are joined by Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital. Yeah, it's a really fascinating conversation. We cover lots of topics, obviously the investment landscape. We talk about scaling capital, the impact of AI and much more. So Amelia, welcome back onto the podcast. Can you believe your first appearance was back in May 2023?
Wow, I can't believe it's gone by so quickly. Thank you for having me back. Absolutely. So for our newer listeners, and perhaps a refresher for the veterans, could you just introduce yourself and your journey to your role at Amadeus today?
Sure. So my name is I'm Amelia Armour, so I'm a venture capital partner at Amadeus Capital Partners. We're a deep tech venture capital firm, which means we're providing finance to science and technology startups at their earliest stages. So often that's companies that are spinning out of universities or people starting very early companies and we're trying to get them to grow to the next stages. And we were founded by Herman Hauser and Anne Glover 28 years ago. So we've been in Cambridge for a long time. So obviously a lot has changed over that time. And the growth of Cambridge, especially in commercialisation and tech transfer, has been fundamentally amazing, really. And we continue to just stick to our core of really supporting companies at their earliest stages.
So before we start talking a little bit more about Amadeus Capital, James, do you know that you just called some of our listeners veterans?
Well, veteran listeners, yeah. But no, I'm not implying they're old. Okay, I'm just checking. I'm just checking how you're labelling our listeners here. Love it. Lovingly referring to them as veterans. Lovingly. That's good then. I'm happy with that.
So, Emilio, yes, welcome. It's great to have you back on with us. Actually, before we go into Amadeus, just tell us a little bit about your journey. What got you to be in partnering within Amadeus in itself?
Because you've had quite a good journey yourself.
Yes, I actually started in Cambridge. So I grew up in Newmarket. I went to school in Cambridge and I did science A levels, really enjoyed doing biology, chemistry, maths. And I went to Durham and studied natural sciences and I focused on chemistry and biology. So I really enjoy the scientific rigor, really enjoyed learning about those subjects. But when I finished at Durham, I moved to London. I trained as an accountant with Deloitte. So I was there for just over three years. And again, I really liked it there, bringing the financial rigor, the training that you got of becoming an accountant. And then I moved to Australia and worked in investment banks for a couple of years, came back to the UK, worked for investment banks in London. And then at that point I had a young family and I wanted to move out of London, so moved to Saffron Walden and got the job with Amadeus. And that was 16, 17 years ago now. And so today I now sort of combine my interest and love of supporting new science initiatives along with the financial rigor that the accountancy training has given me and I see that as quite a good combination and now through my time at Amadeus I've worked with tens of different startups generally I'm sitting on between six and eight boards a time but that is continually changing as we make new investments or we sell companies and so a lot of the investments that I'm working with, they go through the similar, although they might have different technology focuses, they go through the same challenges at the beginning. And that's the stage of the companies that I really enjoy, going from that earliest stage to getting them to the Series A funding and beyond. And often it's going from great tech to an amazing product that customers want to buy. And that's the bit that I'm most enthusiastic about. And for me, Amadeus has just been great because I just get to work with the most amazing, optimistic founders who are bringing technologies which are going to have a global impact. And some might say naively, but they have a real vision of how they can bring those products and technologies to market, which is just amazing to work with and being able to help them in some way through providing funding and advice has just been absolutely brilliant and so I think I've been a partner for five or six years now we're a four partner team and so the relationships that I have with my Amadeus colleagues is absolutely brilliant as well we all have a range of different backgrounds VC is great for that you have people that have technology backgrounds, economic backgrounds, they've been founders themselves. And so this real melting pot of different skill sets, which we then use to really help scale businesses and really wanting to scale big businesses in the UK. Yeah, I mean, it really is just one of those brilliant jobs that's got the best of all worlds to it, hasn't it? You get the board positions, you get to see the innovative, you get to do the advice and it just is a really great role to have.
So you mentioned a couple of the companies. Just give us a bit of a sense of what is the style of the portfolio? What types of companies do you invest in? What size is the portfolio?
Yeah, so we're raising funds of around about 100 million is the size of each fund and then we will invest in about 20 different companies within that fund. And we are focused on different sectors. So we're heavily investing in AI and have done for a number of years and that's what we call across the AI stack. So that's hardware, so new silicon, photonics, bringing through new computer and ideas. Then middleware and tools to help people maybe with training models and then applications so people who are delivering speech technologies such as poly ai which is a business that came from cambridge and so there's a number of ai companies in the portfolio but then that moves on to quantum investments where we were quite an early investor in quantum companies so in cambridge we have river lane and new quantum who are quite well established river lane's just had its 10-year anniversary And so they, alongside a company that we have in Canada called Photonic, are three established quantum companies that we've invested in. We then do a bit in the life sciences side as well. So we have Constructive Bio in Cambridge. It's a super exciting company which comes from Jason Chen's research here. And then on the novel materials side, we're also making investments, say Paragraph and Zampler, which companies you probably know who are both based in Cambridge, that sit into the novel materials part of the portfolio. Awesome. So, I mean, there's a lot to unpick in the three years since your last appearance, but why don't we start big picture?
So what are you seeing right now in terms of the UK economy as a whole? And what's the effect on venture capital and startups in the UK?
Yes, this has been an absolutely bumper year so far. So we've had a first half where $17 billion has gone into venture-backed companies in the UK, some really sizable European leading rounds that have taken place, a lot into AI-related companies. And so the first half of 26, that's the biggest first half of the year we've seen since 2022. So big scale up round that are happening, so billion dollar plus rounds. We've seen one company that spun out of Google DeepMind, a billion dollar seed round, the largest in Europe for a seed round. It's a really exciting time to be in the UK. There's a lot of government support and government initiatives which are also helping to support early stage companies. So there's the Sovereign AI Fund, which is a 500 million fund, which is providing capital and also access to compute for early stage AI companies. But then you have the British Business Bank who are investing in much larger tickets. They will do up to £100 million plus into funding rounds. We've seen them come into the Oxford Quantum Circuit, so QC's round in Oxford this year. So we're seeing these larger funding rounds now taking place, which was... Always the complaint in the UK that we could get seed funding and series A funding for our startups but that they would be sold early before they had reached a large scale and that has really changed and I think that's one of the most significant things that has changed probably since I last saw you over the last three years and this real drive within the UK get these larger funding rounds into companies so that we can scale big businesses here.
And what's driven that bounce back, that confidence?
So the fundamental research and the strength of the talent in the UK is absolutely world leading. So our universities remain at the forefront of cutting edge research, but we're also seeing individuals spinning out of larger startups to start their own businesses. They've then gone through a period of learning about how you would grow a business. They then hit the ground running. Much faster, they've seen others do the same thing, so they're inspired and have ambition to either match or do better than previous companies that have scaled. And then we're attracting a lot of talent. And then people like Anthropic are setting up in the UK. They're paying very high salaries and sucking people in, which makes it difficult for some of our startups to compete because of the salaries that they're paying. But equally, that then creates a vacuum for other people to move into the UK. So then you're attracting people to come here. And in the UK, although the costs of employing people have gone up, you have to still compare that to other jurisdictions. And so within Europe, and if you compare to the costs of employing similar people in the US, It's still cheaper to do that in the UK, so you can get really strong talent at a cheaper price in the UK, meaning that people like Anthropic are coming here and accessing that talent. Yeah, I mean, it's great because you've got the inward investment opportunity with companies like Anthropic, but then you've got the scale up, which is obviously starting to kick in. And I want to pick up on that a little bit if I can. So I know Innovate Cambridge there, it seems every month there's another Cambridge company that's being announced as a unicorn. So we had Niobolt a couple of months ago and then Cusp AI. And that really reflects what you're talking about as well with some of these companies online.
Going in a lot earlier with a lot bigger funding rounds. Certainly, that's the case for Cust by Eye. So, we're starting to see this trend of people getting bigger funding rounds quicker. But there's a constant narrative of the startups and the scale-ups and are we producing too many startups and that's affecting the scale-up funds? Do we need that many startups because it keeps the funnel full? I mean, what are your thoughts on that? How much of a problem is it or have we got a definite shift going on in the market?
Yeah, I think we have a definite shift at the later stages. At the startup level, we need lots of companies starting up. And you see now more people, which has been a gradual trend for the last 10, 15 years, more people leaving university and thinking about startups as a route. Rather than, "Oh, I'll go to London or I'll join a graduate scheme or go straight into employment." They're at a point where they can take high risk because they've got nothing to lose and so they're moving into startups. So the whole culture around joining a startup, talking about entrepreneurship, that has really changed in the UK over the last 10 years. And so you get very high quality people that are then taking what they've learned at university and starting businesses. And so we really want to promote that. I think there's almost no limit to how many startups we could have. It is a funnel, obviously. Not everyone will be successful. Some people will learn a lot and then go and maybe do it again, do it for the second time and be much more successful. That's absolutely fine. But it's this continual funding and support and delivery of high quality talent into the scale up companies, which is really important. And so at the moment, a lot of the high quality people to scale up these businesses, we are pulling in from overseas jurisdictions. We get people in from the US to help with that scale up. Those are expensive resources. And so you need a lot of capital to attract those people in. And so this now generation of greater scale capital is, It has got a lot better. We talked about the government initiatives which have helped. We're also seeing slowly pension fund money moving into that market. There's billions of capital that could become available through pension funds allocating into private assets. And you'll know about things like the Mansion House Accord where pension funds have signed up to putting money into private capital assets. And people like Nest, who are the biggest pension providers, saying that they'll do now up to 10% into private assets, is great. It's very slowly happening, but again, over the next 10 years could make a substantial difference because We don't have at the moment lots of multi-billion dollar size funds in the UK. And so when you look at who is funding the scale up companies, it's not necessarily UK money, it's overseas money. And obviously money is happy to move across borders where it's going to make money. But ideally we would have UK funds.
Money getting the return on the investment that has been made into the university systems and other systems to then keep the returns in the UK as these companies develop.
Do you think we'll start to see a shift? Because on the podcast, whenever there's a new funding announcement, we're reading off now a Rolodex of investors that are coming in providing funding. And they are, like you say, they're coming from all over the world, which is a good thing because all money can support these different businesses. But how much do you think we can actually create that switch to it being UK funded as opposed to always reliant on overseas?
Yeah. Yeah, so it's obviously great these companies are getting funding. There are a couple of reasons why it would be preferable if it was more domestic capital that was funding the companies. One, it's quicker for people to raise their money. They can travel shorter distances rather than going all around the world, rather than going out to Silicon Valley, going out to Singapore or elsewhere to speak to these funders. You can just do it locally. Obviously, then that speeds up your funding cycles. And the CEO then is not spending all his or her time on the road speaking to investors. So, it's one of the reasons why having UK scale-up capital would be good. The other is this point about then returns going to UK investors. And the big money sits with the pension funds. We've seen movement by Railpen, by Ness, by NatWest Cushion, others that are investing into this asset class. Again, the British Business Bank has helped there. They've had their fund, which has crowded in this pension fund money, which they're investing then on behalf of the pension funds into scale-up rounds. And so that is positive and will continue, but it's just been slower than people had hoped.
Yeah, my last question before I hand over to James. James is chomping at the bit to get in here. But yeah, so my last one is we had Corrosion Radar on a couple of weeks ago. Shiraz came on and actually talked about they've raised quite a small amount of money. It's 12 million because what they've done is they've got the funding from corporate contracts. So I'm just interested to my last question on this topic for you is what's that balance between the startups getting corporate funding or corporate contracts as a mix with other types of investment?
Yeah, people can do that. Obviously, if you can fund yourself through selling product, that is the ideal. And if you can fund yourself substantially enough to grow quickly enough, that is absolutely brilliant. Because it's obviously, it's a free form of finance. Venture capital funding is expensive to take in terms of the dilution that the founders take. So yes, absolutely brilliant if people can do that. That may not always be possible depending on the state of development of the product and the technology. But being clever in how you get other forms of non-dilutive funding is really important. So applying for grants, applying for EIC grants, getting access to compute from the hyperscalers, that can make a substantial difference. I've got one company in my portfolio where they had a two million seed round. And have taken $4 million of undiluted capital through grants and access to credits for compute. And so that makes a massive difference in terms of your runway and what you can develop before you need to go out for the next funding round.
I've got one more supplementary on the kind of scale-up funding things, and I promise I'll move the topic on. But as you were describing that, it prompted a question that I hadn't thought of before. You implied that pension money won't be a floodgates opening situation. It will maybe take time. But then I guess that prompts a question...
From the venture capital industry side of things, are you having those conversations today to plan for, you know, much larger sums of money being available for you to deploy? And then I guess a secondary question to that is we hear from founders that going to the US to raise money isn't always just about the check they can write. It's about their appetite for risk. So do you think there's a psychological change that will be required with UK venture capital that with those greater sums of money, more risks and more gambles can be taken?
Yeah, I think to answer the last part first, having a range of investors on your cap table and on the board with different experience, it really helps make the company more of a success. And so you're right that it's not just the capital, it's the talent and the contact, importantly, that you get with that capital. And so I have a variety of companies, but one that has just closed around, which hasn't been announced, where two or three leading US investors have come into that funding round. Now, the capital is one thing, but it's the connectivity in the US because that's where the company is selling, where all the customers are. Their connections with the supply chain that the company needs are super important. And And so it's the background and the Rolodex of the people as much as the capital, which will make a fundamental difference to this particular company because it's in a competitive market. There are others that have similar products, but this investor group in the US will really help them. And so... One of the interesting things that the British Business Bank has done is they've made an announcement with a US fund called Playground. And so Playground is setting up a UK fund. And so in part, that's to slightly address this connectivity and mix of talent. So you have the Playground people who We'll obviously have people on the ground in the UK, but they are a US fund who are then setting up a UK fund that will be focused on investing in the UK. And so then you get the capital in the UK, but you also get this access to talent as well to help the businesses scale. Okay. That's really interesting, but we will move on. The other topic that you'll be unsurprised to hear that is constantly cropping up in every conversation we have is the impact of AI. You said Amadeus was early into AI, so maybe you could just run us through, roughly speaking, this topic. What percentage of your portfolio is AI related? And then there's a whole bunch of topics that kind of fall out from that. Things like sovereign compute. You say you're working across the stack on AI. So it'd be really interesting to get your thoughts around that side of things as well.
Yes, so quite a high proportion of the portfolio are working in some way connected with AI. And then a lot of the companies, even if they're a novel materials company, will be deploying and using AI tools to help them as well. The driver of the, especially the hardware and infrastructure investing is is the amount of money that the hyperscalers are deploying into the builds of new data centres. And that's super interesting because it's pulling through new technologies into the data centres at a rate that we wouldn't have seen before. And that is to deal with the issues of movement of data, speed of compute, the cooling that is required, the energy uses that is required. And so technologies that are being developed to address these issues within the data centres, we're seeing them pulled through really quickly by the hyperscalers at the moment. And this race or desire by some of the bigger companies to compete against NVIDIA. NVIDIA has a huge stronghold in this market with their GPUs. And so other hyperscalers wanting to get access to some of that market. Again, you see them then supporting new types of silicon, new types of chips that can work on the inference side to go after part of the NVIDIA market. It's super interesting because obviously NVIDIA don't stand still and are innovating at the same rate, but there's a huge market opportunity for people to go after there. I think one of the things that's been quite interesting from an investment point of view over the last few years is obviously the release of the large language models. And whereas applied AI companies, so software companies that are offering solutions based on AI, some of them have come under threat through the large language models. And so last year, there were a number of companies that we would see, which we would call LLM wrapper companies. So basically people building products on the top of large language models. And we were very wary of those because the core of what we do is investing in companies which have a strong amount of IP or know-how behind what they're doing. And in those types of companies, there wasn't strong IP. And so it's, well, what do you have? And so if you could identify people that had maybe access to particular data moats that others couldn't to set them apart, it was a challenging space to invest. And we've seen a few later stage funds that... Would have just solely invested in enterprise software companies, so right at the top of the stack, really moving down the stack because one of the advantages of investing in hardware companies is they generally have a significant amount of IP, which is protecting what they're doing. So the introduction of the large language models has really shaken up the investment market and where people have looked for opportunities by companies. And so we've seen a lot more chip companies being funded now. So hardware sort of seems to come in and goes out of fashion. But at the moment, you've seen companies like Fractal and Olix who are getting funding, which is all on the hardware side.
Am I right to then infer you see this playing out slightly different to how the SaaS market played out? Because obviously in the SaaS world, there was huge amounts of investment poured into the kind of application layers and the services layer. That kind of software as a service piece. Do you feel like the value then with AI is deeper down in the stack, in the fundamentals?
It is, yeah, definitely from an investment point of view, because there's been a fear of a new release of a model by Anthropic or ChatGPT that might really disrupt those companies that have been working at the applied AI level. And we've seen a lot of companies move quickly to either adopt LLMs and then They're really differentiating their product in a different way. They're very quick for deployment. They're providing a number of services. They're providing these forward deployed engineers to help people really develop products that are related to the particular company. So more bespoke products. So that is definitely changing. And some of the companies in the US, Harvey, the legal tech company, really working at pace to develop new products. And it's all around the speed of iteration and people working exceptionally long hours there because there isn't a strong IP moat. One thing that's been really striking in conversations we've been having with younger founders, typically at that kind of seed or pre-seed stage, is they are effectively building native AI companies. And the ramifications of that are quite dramatic. You think of things like headcount and their plans for how they grow their teams, maybe up to 40% less people than they might have hired even just maybe two years ago. So I'm always interested, coupled with the optimism at the beginning of the conversation around more capital flowing in, Not particularly just Amadeus's opinion, but generally speaking, what kind of advice are investors giving to founders today in terms of managing burn rates and their cost side of their businesses?
Things like people, office space, those traditional kind of things that are on the balance sheet. Is it still be really mindful of your burn rates and invest in the technologies and the software engineering side of the business? Or are you seeing a softening of that?
Yeah, it's interesting. For IP-rich companies, you often need still specific talent, and so they're hiring people related to their field. What it means is they can often get going much more quickly, as you say, because they can use the large language models to help them do a lot of their work, to help them with all of the coding, so it's much quicker. So what we're actually seeing is people, the gap between seed and, well, pre-seed and seed is getting much closer. So people raise smaller pre-seed rounds, iterate much faster. They can get to a proof of concept product much more quickly and then going out then for a seed round on the back of that. So it's accelerating innovation, which is super exciting. They then raise a larger seed round and then you're sort of starting to recruit a lot of people. So it's interesting. There was some research done in the US and for companies that were the most heavy adopters of AI, they were actually recruiting the most people. And so that is obviously that was a subset within technology companies. But certainly within our portfolio, all the companies that are raising money and doing well, they're not reducing headcount. They're just potentially recruiting in other areas. You still need all your sales team. You still need all your marketing team. You still need... All the support you potentially need to pull in a lot of specialist people. Haven't seen sort of headcount reductions coming through as a result of AI, but we have seen speed up in iteration of product. Really interesting isn't it if you think about you you're sending your kid off to university or to do an apprenticeship or something and a few years ago it was all about cyber security and data scientists and those types of things but actually a lot of the shift is now going back to those softer skills like you like you say knowing being able to do the sales do the marketing all that kind of stuff it's i just find it fascinating how it's all secular. It just keeps going round, doesn't it?
So a couple of, going back to James's comment, a couple of episodes that we've done that have covered this, you had Rafi from Genie AI and Debbie Toms came on from Cusp AI that I think are really good examples of the conversation that the two of you have just had. So the next thing I wanted to move on to was a little bit more on the portfolio, but I I feel we've done quite a bit of that already. So I'm going to curveball it for you and give you something slightly different.
So you've talked about some, again, some of the companies we know in Cambridge, the Riverlanes, New Quantum, Samplers, Paragraphs, those types of organisations. If you could build your superstar company, what would it look like? So you get a blank piece of paper and go, this is the next company I want in my portfolio. What would they look like?
Oh, that's quite challenging. So companies that I'm excited about at the moment, definitely on the photonic side. So the use of light to move data around rather than electrons. And the UK is very strong, is strong there. And so... Those types of companies I find really interesting. I've got a Spanish company called iPronix, which is developing optical circuit switches which go into the data centre. And this is from the data centre moving from copper wire into using light. And it's part of this movement of the hyperscalers pulling through new technologies. But definitely this rise in the use of light rather than electrons. So definitely a photonics company in the UK would be great to have in the portfolio. Robotics is exciting for us. So we've invested in a company that's actually at Oxford called Stateful, which is when C customers have deployed one robot, autonomous robot, they may want to then have a whole fleet of them. So say you want to do inspections of solar farms. And so that's all about mission control. And so I orchestrating all of the autonomous robots working together to get the mission completed and then dealing with difficult situations because one of the batteries runs out or something's blocking a path and so State will do all of that. So I think robotics and the development of robots in the industrial setting is super interesting as well. I think robotics is a really interesting one because it seemed to have dipped out of favour a little while ago, but now because of the UK's manufacturing capabilities are increasing, I think robotics seems to be much more on the agenda, doesn't it?
Yeah, definitely. And I think quantum in the UK, we've got the established companies which knew Quantum River Lane, others in the UK, but a whole breed of new style of quantum companies coming through. And as the quantum hardware develops, we'll start to see a whole application layer developing. And I think the universities Glasgow, Lancaster, Sussex, lots of universities working on different aspects of the quantum stack. And so I think that's where the UK has a strong advantage as well and huge government support for the quantum development in the UK. There's a current programme called the Procure programme where the UK has committed two billion to that and the first phase of that is happening at the moment. And what I'm super excited about that programme is it's attracting other quantum companies to move and set up in the UK. So I've been in touch with one European quantum company that wants to set up an office in Cambridge because they're going to hopefully access this Procure money. And that is just brilliant because we are bringing them in really strong talent behind.
To the UK and in particular in this example into Cambridge and that is where a programme like this government procure programme can be really successful. As we start to think about wrapping the conversation up it feels like it's been a really optimistic conversation which is nice because it hasn't always been like that has it over the last kind of 18 months.
Well generally our podcast episodes. I mean what are you saying? I'm thinking more specifically about the economic side of things. But so, I mean, that's a really welcome conversation. But just to wrap up on a couple of kind of final topics, I guess it'd be really interesting your comment about AI speeding up the funnel, the early stage innovation. Getting founders to approve a concept faster. I guess the flip side of more ideas coming into the funnel is it makes the VC's job harder to filter, right? So in this growing kind of amount of ideas that are being generated, I guess it's quality over quantity always. Any tips to founders on how they can cut through and have those conversations?
It's really interesting. We were discussing this yesterday because the deal flow is super strong at the moment. So we're seeing loads and loads of ideas. So it's this filtering that is hard and we use AI tools ourself to try and help us with that. But again, it's a few things. It's always the strength of the team. And for people that arrive at the beginning of the journey, can you pull in good advisors to support you? Because that really adds credibility to your pitch. If you've had someone who's an expert in your particular area vouch for you or make the introduction to us, that's really strong, especially when... A particular entrepreneur or new CEO, you might be the first thing that they've done after university. It's like, who else can you attract around you to add validation? It's a clear route to how you get, especially if it's just tech at that point, to product and what market you're going to focus on. We see a lot of companies which have amazing tech and then they say they're going to go after multiple markets and we're always like no it's all about focus in those first couple of years so really think about which is your favourite one or which is the best one to go after and then the way our models work is we have to invest in companies that are going to look to scale globally the product has to go into multiple markets for the VC model. And so, again, questioning it, is VC funding the right type of funding that you want to take for your business?
It's not suitable for all businesses. And it obviously comes with a board director and some loss of control by the founder. And so, thinking through that and the partnerships that people build with the VC, because getting the right VC and getting the right relationships can make a big difference as well. Because You don't want tension on the board because the VC and the CEO doesn't get on.
Some good insights there. I hope our founders are listening.
The final one for me then, we were talking as we were preparing for the conversation around this, the UK flywheel developing. And that point that the more exits that we see, the more you see those employees going back and reinvesting in new ideas, new companies, new And you made a really important point, I think, and it was really interesting because of the nature of Cambridge, we talked to a lot of spin-outs from the university, but you're saying you're seeing more and more innovation coming from non-universities. So maybe talk to us about that a little bit.
Yeah, I think, again, it's a factor of the scale-up companies. So people have then been in companies for a reasonable amount of time. They've learned quite a lot. Either the company exits and then they think, well, I'd like to go and do that myself and start up a business and I can see a real opportunity there. Maybe there was an area at the company they were working at which they would have liked to have focused on, but because it wasn't the main direction the company was going in, they didn't have the opportunity to do that. Or it could be that they've been in a company for a reasonable amount of time, they've worked at Revolut for a number of years, and they want to go and do something else and set up on their own, but again, they've seen this journey happening. And so there's a lot of support for people like that. There are a lot of founders who are willing to give advice to other people who want to set up. And so I think it's relatively easy then to get going and try, try on your own. And I think that's super interesting because often those people, rather than coming from, oh, I've developed a new piece of tech and where is the product for that? Often they've already identified in the market where there is some sort of opportunity because they're much closer to working with customers and seeing the existing product portfolio that might be targeting a particular problem and saying, well, there's a real gap in the market here. And so they can often then pull in relevant people and have the customer relationships already so it can move pretty quickly.
Amelia, it's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for coming back on with us after three years.
Well, I guess we'll see you again.
Well, we'll see you before three years. We will definitely see you during Cambridge Tech Week for sure. But thank you so much for joining us. And it's been really insightful.
No, it's great. Thank you for inviting me. Lovely to see you again.
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