25 UK startups to watch in 2024: Wayve, Flo, Sibstar

Bloomberg ventured to the top of the UK startup list for the second time in a landscape dominated by artificial intelligence. Venture capital investment, which had been stagnant in 2023, began to see growth again in the middle of the year, and the AI ​​craze that OpenAI sparked two years ago was also evident in the UK.

Wayve, a London-based autonomous driving company that is on the list, raised $1 billion this year in a round that included SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft. And it wasn’t just investors who praised Britain’s progress in this technology. Scientists at Google DeepMind, an AI lab founded in Britain, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a model that helped solve the 50-year-old problem of predicting protein structures.

The hundreds of applications submitted from Cardiff, London, Bristol, Southampton and other parts of the UK also highlighted innovative companies in green energy, carbon accounting, health technology and a startup working to solve one of the great mysteries of quantum computing works: how to make this technology accessible for practical applications. We also had some new launches, with Sibstar, a debit card for people with dementia, and Arondite, which develops software tools for the military.