Prima Mente

Prima Mente was named among the first six investees of the UK Sovereign AI Fund on 16 April 2026, receiving 500,000 GPU hours on Isambard-AI alongside same-day visa decisions, R&D visa cover, and access to government procurement pipelines. The company builds biological foundation models — large AI models trained on biological data — specifically targeting brain-disease research and drug discovery.

Foundation models for biology are a rapidly developing area of AI. Unlike general-purpose language models, biological foundation models are pre-trained on genomics, proteomics, or neuroscience data and can be fine-tuned for specific therapeutic or diagnostic applications. Prima Mente's brain-disease focus positions it in a space where the UK has strong academic infrastructure through the Wellcome Trust, the MRC, and NHS data assets.

The DSIT selection frames Prima Mente as part of a portfolio covering both defence and life-Science applications, signalling that the UK Sovereign AI strategy is not limited to security infrastructure. Compute access via Isambard-AI is particularly material for biological foundation models, which require large-scale GPU training that most life-Science startups cannot afford via commercial cloud providers.