Lightspeed Venture Partners
Founded in 2000 by four enterprise founders from Stanford University, Lightspeed is a global multi-stage venture capital firm and pioneer in AI investing, having made its first AI investment in 2012. The firm has backed 957 companies across 28 years, producing 101 unicorns, 38 IPOs, and 257 acquisitions. In December 2025 Lightspeed closed a record $9B fundraise, its largest ever, bringing total AUM to over $40B. With $5.5B deployed across 165 AI native companies, Lightspeed is one of the most active AI investors globally. Notable portfolio companies include Snap, Anthropic, Databricks, Wiz, Rubrik, Affirm, Anduril, and Mistral.
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2 companies in our directory
Helsing
HiringHelsing is a defence technology company focused on building AI-powered software and autonomous systems for military applications across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Founded in Munich in 2021 by Gundbert Scherf, Niklas Kohler, and Torsten Reil, the company has rapidly scaled to become one of Europe's most valuable defence tech startups, valued at €12B following a €600M Series D led by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's Prima Materia. Helsing has delivered thousands of strike drones to Ukraine, acquired aircraft manufacturer Grob Aircraft, and unveiled the CA-1 Europa autonomous combat aerial vehicle. The UK is a core operating market: Helsing incorporated its UK subsidiary simultaneously with German operations in 2021, has committed £350M of investment under the UK-Germany Trinity House Agreement, opened an 18,000 sq ft Resilience Factory in Plymouth to produce the SG-1 Fathom autonomous submarine-hunting glider, and holds multiple MoD contracts including the ASGARD programme for AI-enabled battlefield targeting. The company maintains a London HQ at Mortimer Street and actively hires across UK engineering and AI research roles.
Proxima Fusion
HiringProxima Fusion was founded in April 2023 as a spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, bringing together scientists and engineers from IPP, MIT, and X Development. Co-founded by Dr Francesco Sciortino (CEO, PhD in plasma physics from MIT) and Dr Lucio Milanese (COO, PhD in theoretical plasma physics from MIT, formerly McKinsey), the company is developing quasi-isodynamic stellarators combined with high-temperature superconducting magnets to build the world's first commercial stellarator fusion power plant. Proxima has partnered with RWE and the Free State of Bavaria on a planned €2B facility near Munich. The company has raised €200M to date, including a Series A led by Cherry Ventures and Balderton Capital with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Plural, and others. Proxima maintains a UK presence at the Culham Campus and a London-registered entity.