Scaling up AI start-ups – why is there a UK investment gap?

The UK is acknowledged as the dominant AI player in Europe, adept at hothousing start-ups in London and university towns, and increasingly, in the regions and devolved nations too, where property prices are less of an obstacle.

But Britain’s innovators and entrepreneurs have long faced a tough challenge: how to scale up their businesses to become players on the world stage. Some of the reasons for this should be obvious, in that they are (circumstantially) systemic.

While Britain is the world’s sixth largest economy – it was the fifth earlier this century – a much larger English-speaking market lies just across the Atlantic. US GDP (over $29 trillion) is eight times higher than the UK’s ($3.3 trillion) and the population is five times larger.

So, for a tech start-up to really spread its wings, the US market inevitably beckons – usually a tech hotspot like California or Texas, where ...