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Ex-DeepMind founders raise £14.9m for Airspeed

2 min read
16:40UTC

Airspeed, founded by two former Google DeepMind research scientists, raised £14.9m on 4 June led by Europe's DN Capital, the DeepMind alumni network producing an early-stage company rather than another mega-round.

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TechnologyDeveloping
Key takeaway

DeepMind alumni are founding early-stage UK startups backed by European VCs as well as chasing large US-led rounds.

Airspeed closed a £14.9m ($20m) Series A on Thursday 4 June, led by European venture firm DN Capital. Founders Adam Liska and Devang Agrawal are both former Google DeepMind research scientists, with Agrawal as chief technology officer. The company builds autonomous AI agents for sales teams, software that updates customer-relationship records, flags deal risks and drafts follow-ups during a live sales process. 1

The DeepMind alumni story has run large and outward in this topic. Orbital Industries pulled $50m in May, a round backed by European and American funds , while Geordie's $30m came with a British cheque from Balderton Capital . Both were sizeable Series B or scale-stage rounds.

Airspeed sits at the other end of that range. A £14.9m Series A led by a European fund shows the same alumni network producing companies at the start of their life as well as at scale. The pipeline reads less as one shape than several: mega-rounds chasing capital abroad, mid-sized rounds drawing British leads, and now early-stage cheques European investors can write at founding. The diaspora is widening the range of company it produces rather than settling into a single pattern.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Sales teams at technology companies spend a large fraction of their time on tasks that are administrative rather than selling: updating CRM records, writing follow-up emails, scheduling demos, tracking proposal status. Airspeed builds AI agents that do those administrative tasks autonomously, freeing sales people to spend more time in conversations with potential customers. The founders, Adam Liska and Devang Agrawal, both previously worked as research scientists at Google DeepMind, which is Google's London AI lab. That background in research means they are building agents that reason about context and handle non-standard situations, the functional difference from earlier generations of rules-based sales automation tools.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    DeepMind alumni founding early-stage commercial AI companies in London creates a secondary wave of UK AI startups below the mega-round tier that European VCs can lead without competing with US capital.

  • Risk

    The AI sales-agent category is attracting US capital at higher valuations; Airspeed faces the risk of being acquired or undercut by US competitors with 3-5x its capital before reaching Series B.

Sources:GOV.UK·UK Research and Innovation·GOV.UK
Mentions:Google DeepMind →Orbital Industries →Geordie →Balderton Capital →Google →London →Airspeed →
First Reported In

Update #7 · OQC's £260m sets European quantum record

GOV.UK· 7 Jun 2026
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Causes and effects
Caused by
Orbital's $50m raise has no UK lead
Orbital Industries raising $50m with no UK lead in May contextualises Airspeed's European-led Series A as the early-stage complement to mega-round capital flight.
Occurred 28 May 2026
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Balderton leads Geordie's $30m AI round
Geordie's Balderton-backed $30m round in May showed British VC writing DeepMind-alumni cheques; Airspeed's DN Capital-led Series A extends that pattern.
Occurred 28 May 2026
Read story →
This Event
Ex-DeepMind founders raise £14.9m for Airspeed
The DeepMind diaspora is now seeding small, European-backed startups as well as the larger US-chasing rounds, widening the founder pipeline.
Led to
Conduct takes $60m as SAP buys in
Airspeed's £14.9m from DN Capital adds to the London ex-DeepMind/ex-Palantir enterprise-AI cluster that Conduct's round also reflects.
Occurred 17 Jun 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
Highland Europe
Highland Europe
Highland Europe, the growth-equity firm behind a €1bn-plus fund, took €65m from the British Business Bank into its Technology Growth Fund VI on 30 July via British Patient Capital. For a Geneva-based growth investor, the Bank's cheque is routine cornerstone capital, unrelated to which Whitehall department currently claims to sponsor UKRI.
Integrity Growth Partners
Integrity Growth Partners
The Los Angeles firm put £16.1m into Prevalent AI on 24 August, the London GCHQ-alumni company's first outside capital, specifically to fund its US expansion. Its stake is a single commercial bet on one UK deep-tech founder's American growth, not a comment on which department UKRI answers to this month.
Temasek
Temasek
Temasek led PhysicsX's Series C on 30 July, into which the British Business Bank put $25m through British Growth Partnership Fund I. State-backed pension capital rides behind a foreign-led growth round while UK weekly tech funding fell 72% to £102.95m across nine rounds three weeks later.
Innovate UK's Women in Innovation cohort
Innovate UK's Women in Innovation cohort
Sixty-one founders won £75,000 grants from Innovate UK on 5 August, the programme's largest-ever cohort, with a further 39 highly commended founders taking support without cash. For these founders the sponsorship dispute over UKRI's parent department is academic: the money and mentoring arrived exactly as scheduled.
Financial Conduct Authority
Financial Conduct Authority
The FCA added five fintechs, ClearScore, Modulr, Teya, Urban Jungle and Zilch, to its Scale-up Unit on 7 August, the first cohort it regulates solely rather than jointly with the Prudential Regulation Authority. The unit's expansion is a routine regulatory build-out running on its own timetable, unconnected to the sponsorship dispute over its sister department UKRI.
Cabinet Office
Cabinet Office
The Cabinet Office ran the DSIT-to-BIST transfer as a standard cross-government machinery change, the kind gov.uk pages and framework documents routinely take months to catch up with after any department is abolished or renamed. Officials treat the paperwork lag as administrative sequencing, not dysfunction: funding and grant-approval layers moved first because they had to keep working.