Supporting UK Deep Tech
This month we're featuring an article by Professor Andy Pardoe on why speed matters so much in deep tech, along with six pieces of practical advice on how founders can move with more velocity. Professor Andy Pardoe is a Professor of AI, a serial entrepreneur and Professor in Residence at Corpora, and he builds and backs companies at the intersection of AI and deep tech.
Then we take a look back on what has happened for Corpora in July, from signing the Rebuild Britain open letter by Startup Coalition and Founders Forum Group to joining Cohort 8 of Grow London Global.
Enjoy reading!
The Velocity Problem: Why Deep Tech Wins or Loses on Speed
Britain is brilliant at starting deep tech companies and worryingly slow at moving them from the lab to the market. In a field where being wrong costs years rather than weeks, the decisive advantage is rarely capital and almost never cleverness. It is speed.
By Professor Andy Pardoe - Professor of AI, serial entrepreneur, and Professor in Residence at Corpora.ai
Professor Andy Pardoe. Credit: LinkedIn
The UK is a nation of inventors. Our universities produce world-leading research, our engineers solve problems that matter, and our founders are bold enough to build companies on the back of genuinely hard science. The numbers bear this out. In 2025 the UK attracted nearly six billion dollars of deep tech venture investment, ranking third in the world behind only the United States and China, and the UK has now produced more than fifty companies worth a billion dollars or more.
Yet the same year exposed a quieter weakness. UK domestic investor participation in deep tech falls from well over half at seed stage to under a tenth at the late stage, and the Royal Academy of Engineering puts the annual late-stage funding gap somewhere between four and eleven billion dollars. The usual reading of these figures is that Britain has a money problem. I want to argue that underneath the money problem sits something more fundamental: a speed problem. We are slow to move ideas from a result in a lab to a product in a market, and in deep tech, slowness is the most expensive mistake of all.
Speed means something different in deep tech
Most startup advice is written for software companies, and most software companies can be wrong cheaply. You ship a product, watch what users do, and change it next week. The cost of being wrong is a sprint. Deep tech does not work like this. When a company is built on a novel application of artificial intelligence, a new approach to data, a piece of hardware, or a scientific result that has never left a lab, the cost of being wrong is months and, sometimes, years.
This changes what velocity means. For a software founder, velocity is how fast you ship. For a deep tech founder, velocity is how fast you learn, because every wrong assumption you carry forward gets multiplied by a development cycle you cannot compress.
The passage from an idea that works in principle to a product a customer will pay for is long, expensive and leadership-intensive, and the founders who cross it quickly are almost never the ones with the most extraordinary science. They are the ones who refuse to spend a year building before they know whether anyone wants the result.
Friction is the enemy of velocity
The speed of founders is in many cases, a symptom of the system around them, and Britan’s system adds friction in places that are easy to overlook. Venture capital remains heavily concentrated in and around London, accounting for close to half of all deals and the majority of investment value. Meanwhile the research that deep tech is built on is spread across the country in clusters that get overlooked.
The consequence is a slower feedback loop. When the ideas are born in one place and the capital and commercial networks sit in another, every conversation that should take a week takes a month, and founders burn velocity either relocating before they are ready or building investor confidence at a distance. The answer is not to move everyone to the capital. It is to remove the friction where the research already is, so that the distance between an insight and the people who can fund or buy it shrinks. Velocity is the result of stopping making good ideas wait.
How can founders move faster
After working with a great many early-stage deep tech founders, I have become opinionated about what genuinely accelerates a company in its first year and what merely looks busy. Six things matter more than the rest, and each one is, at heart, a way of buying back time.
- Validate the innovation before you build it.The single most valuable move a founder can make is establishing whether what they have fallen in love with can become a business. For deep tech this is a question about the science as much as the market. Is the innovation genuinely novel, or has someone already filed the patent? Is there real demand, and who already occupies the space? Which problems are worth solving at all? Platforms like Corpora compresses the time frame that this validation takes from months of manual desk research to a fraction of that, allowing a founder to interrogate their thinking and see whether an innovation has a credible path to commercialisation within in days rather than quarters.
- Find the better idea before someone else does. Speed is not only about validating the idea you already have. It is about discovering the ones you cannot yet see. Corpora’s platform gives founders a workbench to test an innovation's commercial potential and surface the hidden connections which reveal adjacent applications and overlooked opportunities sitting in the white space around it. This reveals not only what matters now, but what is likely to matter next, turning a single idea into a portfolio of options, letting the founder move toward the biggest opportunity while it’s still open. Generating better ideas faster is itself a form of velocity, and it is the one founders most often ignore.
- Get hands-on help turning the idea into a business. Evidence tells a founder whether an innovation is worth pursuing. It does not, by itself, build the company. The work of commercialisation still has to happen, and it happens fastest when you are surrounded by people who have done it before. Structured programmes such as ICURe push founders out into the market early and let real evidence shape the direction. Bespoke commercialisation partners such as Origin Works go further again, working hands-on inside the venture to turn an early signal into pricing, pilots, funding pathways and a credible route to market across the first critical months, which is exactly where founders tend to lose the most time. Validation tells you the destination is worth reaching, support gets you there quicker.
- Borrow experience to skip the slow lessons. A founder can read every book and still not know what to do when a pilot customer goes quiet and cash is tight. One-to-one guidance from people who have already made the mistakes compresses years of painful learning into a few honest conversations. The point of a mentor is not encouragement, it is judgement, applied to your specific situation. And it is one of the fastest accelerants available.
- Learn in parallel, not in series. There is a particular kind of speed that comes from sitting alongside other founders at a similar stage who are solving entirely different problems. They challenge your assumptions in ways no single adviser can, because they are in the trenches at the same moment, and the cross-pollination shortens everyone's learning curve at once. You can never have too many inputs, and the speed the market means you cannot afford to gather them one at a time.
- Be investment-ready before you need to be. Given everything the funding figures tell us, this is not optional. The goal of the early months is not to raise money but to build a company that deserves funding and can explain why, clearly, to the right people, so that when the moment comes you do not lose months getting ready for a conversation you could have been ready for all along. Investment-readiness is a craft, and the founders who treat it as a habit accelerate when others stall.
Speed compounds
Everything points to the same conclusion. The late-stage funding gap is real and serious, but it is not the only place the system leaks. A great many companies never reach the late stage at all, not because the capital was missing but because they moved too slowly through the years where speed was cheapest to build. The earliest stage is where a small gain in velocity compounds into the largest advantage, because every month saved at the start is a month earned at every stage that follows.
This is why pace, set early and deliberately, is not a soft virtue in the innovation economy. It is structural. When a founder validates an idea quickly, finds the right first customer sooner, sharpens their story before they are forced to, and reaches the right investor without losing a year in transit, the return does not accrue to one company alone. It widens the mouth of the pipeline the whole country depends on to produce its scale-ups and its eventual giants. The promise of platforms like Corpora.ai is to make that speed ordinary rather than exceptional, putting frontier-scale research intelligence within reach of any founder from the first day, so that moving early stops being the privilege of the few who happen to have the right network.
The best deep tech companies are not the ones with the cleverest science. They are the ones that learned, early and fast, how to turn that science into something the world will actually use, before the clock that governs hard technology runs out on them.
About Origin Works
Origin Works turns deep tech research and innovation into real-world outcomes. Working hands-on inside the venture rather than around it, the team acts as a commercialisation bench for founders through their first twelve to twenty-four months. Its support spans funding and finance pathways, the shaping of offers, pricing, pilots and early sales, regulatory and technical routes to market, and fractional commercial and operational expertise. Origin Works collaborates with founders emerging from university innovation programmes, incubators, accelerators and translational schemes, and connects them with the industry partners able to scale their impact. For more information click here.
Corpora.ai Monthly Recap
Rebuild Britain Open letter
As Professor Andy Pardoe sets out in his article, Britain has no shortage of invention. What it lacks is the infrastructure to consistently move this to the market. That's why we're proud to support the Rebuild Britain open letter to the UK's new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, published by Startup Coalition and Founders Forum Group. It urges the government to think about what Britain needs to be sovereign in the age of AI, and to back and build the companies of the future while we still have the chance.
Our CEO and Co-Founder Mel Morris CBE and CMO David Pugh-Jones have both signed, alongside hundreds of other UK tech founders. If you are a UK-based founder, read the letter and add your name here.
Corpora joins Grow London Global
Corpora has officially joined Cohort 8 of the Grow London Global programme by Grow London. Being part of this exceptional group of UK companies is an incredible milestone as we continue building the next generation of frontier research infrastructure. A huge thank you to the Grow London team and all of the partners supporting this initiative. We're looking forward to the opportunities, connections, and international growth ahead. Congratulations to the rest of Cohort 8, we can't wait to see what everyone builds.
Looking back on London Tech Week with TechUK.
At London Tech Week our CMO, David Pugh-Jones, spoke with TechUK about how AI and human researchers can work symbiotically to solve problems with more velocity than what has been possible before. He brought it to life with the work we've done with one of our partner companies, UCR Group, where our technology helped them develop an approach that more than doubles the output of solar energy. Watch the full video here.
Supporting Founders with ReachX.
Corpora's CCO, Matt Jones joined the judging panel of ReachX's Summer Pitch Night. At Corpora, we believe that events like this, that give founders a room to test their ideas and come away with real feedback is one of the more useful things you can do for the startup ecosystem. Congratulations to everyone who pitched, it was a genuine pleasure to hear what you've been building. A huge thank you to Matthieu Gervis for the invite, and to the team at ReachX for a great evening.
Thank you for reading this months newsletter! To stay up-to-date with what is happening at Corpora.ai and gain valuable insights from our ecosystem sign up to our newsletter on LinkedIn. See you next month!
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