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UK Startups and Innovation
21SEP

Ex-DeepMind founders raise £14.9m for Airspeed

2 min read
16:52UTC

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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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:Tech Funding News·US Securities and Exchange Commission·Open Cosmos
Mentions:Google DeepMind →Orbital Industries →Geordie →Balderton Capital →Google →London →Airspeed →
First Reported In

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Tech Funding News· 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
Nscale and Open Cosmos
Nscale and Open Cosmos
Nscale chose the New York Stock Exchange for its listing on 18 September, putting Britain's largest AI infrastructure bet to American public investors rather than British ones. Open Cosmos took the opposite route four days earlier, raising nine figures from an all-domestic syndicate on five years of profit, evidence that staying is possible when the balance sheet allows it.
Dame Chi Onwurah and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Dame Chi Onwurah and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Committee chair Dame Chi Onwurah wrote to government on 7 September asking how Matt Clifford's conflict at ARIA arose and what safeguards protect its governance, and expects a detailed response. Her question has not yet been put to the Sovereign AI Unit, whose own chair sits at a venture capital firm while overseeing state AI equity.
The Entrepreneurs Network
The Entrepreneurs Network
The Entrepreneurs Network's founder survey found 65% say Britain is easy to start a business in but only 14% say it is easy to scale one, with 82% negative on tax and 74% finding investment hard to access. On this reading the constraint is regulation and tax, not the capital-vehicle design the state keeps adjusting.
New Economics Foundation
New Economics Foundation
The New Economics Foundation argues fiscal accounting rules, not political will, cap what Britain's state capital vehicles can do. Matching the KfW and Bpifrance benchmark of 1% of GDP would need the National Wealth Fund to deploy roughly GBP21bn a year by 2028-29, about four times its current capacity.
Competition and Markets Authority
Competition and Markets Authority
The CMA's 8 September report on public procurement asked whether Britain's roughly GBP400bn state-spending system is built to grow high-potential firms rather than simply widen SME participation. Its Recommendation 5 calls for a dedicated frontier-technology procurement framework, an official acknowledgement that today's design may serve the wrong target.
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.