The UK's Hard Tech Job Board

Chaos Industries

CHAOS Industries is a Los Angeles-based defence technology company that develops advanced radar, sensor, communication, and detection systems for national security applications. The company's flagship platform, Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN), delivers high-performance sensing and electronic effects across land, sea, and air domains. Its commercial radar product, Vanquish, provides early warning and tracking against drones, missiles, and aircraft. Founded by former executives of defence tech firm Epirus, CHAOS has grown rapidly in the counter-drone and critical infrastructure space. The company was valued at $4.5 billion following its latest funding round in late 2025, positioning it as one of the fastest-growing defence technology startups in the US.

Fractile

Fractile is a London-based AI chip startup developing in-memory computing processors designed to run large language model inference up to 100x faster and 10x cheaper than current GPU systems. Founded by Oxford Robotics Institute PhD graduate Walter Goodwin, the company's novel chip architecture fuses computation with memory to eliminate the data-shuttling bottleneck that limits conventional hardware. Fractile emerged from stealth in July 2024 and has since announced a £100M commitment to expand UK operations, including a new hardware engineering facility in Bristol. The team includes senior hires from NVIDIA, ARM, and Imagination Technologies.

Olix

Olix Computing is a London-based startup developing the Optical Tensor Processing Unit (OTPU), a new type of AI accelerator that uses photonics rather than traditional GPU architecture for AI inference. The company integrates photonics with an SRAM-based memory architecture, which it claims can outperform high-bandwidth memory systems in efficiency, throughput per watt, and overall cost. Originally registered as Flux Corp Ltd in March 2024, the company rebranded to Olix Computing. Founded by 25-year-old serial entrepreneur James Dacombe, who also runs brain-monitoring company CoMind, Olix has grown to over 70 employees and plans to ship its first products by 2027. Valued at over $1B.

DeepMind

Google DeepMind is an AI research laboratory focused on building artificial general intelligence. Founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, the company was acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately $660M. DeepMind pioneered breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a world champion at Go, and AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem and has been used by over two million researchers worldwide. The lab remains headquartered in London with a large UK engineering presence and continues to push the boundaries of reinforcement learning, large language models, and scientific AI.

ARX Robotics

ARX Robotics is a Munich-based defence technology company developing autonomous ground vehicles and software platforms for European armed forces. Founded in 2021 by former German Bundeswehr officers Marc Wietfeld, Maximilian Wied, and Stefan Röbel, the company builds modular unmanned ground systems including the Gereon tracked reconnaissance vehicle and Hector scalable autonomous platform, alongside Mithra OS, an AI-powered system for modernising legacy military fleets. ARX systems are already deployed in Ukraine and along NATO's eastern flank, and the company is field testing with British Armed Forces. In 2025, ARX announced a £45M investment in a UK manufacturing facility expected to produce 1,800 autonomous systems annually. The company raised a €42M Series A led by HV Capital.

Graphcore

Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI semiconductor company founded in 2016 by serial semiconductor entrepreneurs Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles. Toon previously led XMOS and Picochip, while Knowles co-founded Element14 (acquired by Broadcom) and Icera (acquired by NVIDIA for $435M). The company developed Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), novel AI accelerators designed from the ground up for machine learning workloads, alongside the proprietary Poplar graph programming framework. Graphcore raised $767M in total funding, reaching a $2.77B valuation, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Amadeus, Microsoft, and others. In July 2024, SoftBank Group acquired Graphcore for approximately $500M to $600M. The company continues to operate from Bristol with plans to expand its UK headcount to 750.