UK Could Soon Produce Its First £100 Billion Tech Company
James Wise, general partner at Balderton Capital and chair of the UK Government’s Sovereign AI fund, argues that Britain’s technology market is closer to producing a £100 billion company than its reputation suggests. Speaking to Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie at London Tech Week, Wise said UK funding is now robust at later stages, but that policymakers must help companies scale globally by using government procurement, data, expertise and state infrastructure, not just public capital.
The UK funding gap Wise sees is no longer at company formation
? james-wise described UK tech investment as materially stronger than its reputation suggests. More than £6 billion, he said, was invested into the UK in the last quarter alone — more than “the whole of continental Europe combined” and far above where the market stood five years ago.
The old criticism was that British technology companies sold too early or moved to the US too early because the domestic market could not support them at scale. Wise argued that this is changing. UK companies are now raising at billion-pound valuations and at £10 billion valuations, and he said “there may even be a £100 billion private company announced soon.”
Wise framed the £100 billion company as imminent, not yet announced. His broader point was that the UK market is no longer defined only by early-stage formation. It is producing companies that can raise at scales that once would have been treated as evidence they needed to leave.
That does not mean the scale-up problem has disappeared. Wise’s distinction was between a market that has become “really robust” and a system that still has to keep momentum moving “in the right direction.” His work at Balderton Capital and with government sits in that gap: not proving that the UK can start technology companies, but helping more of them become global companies.
The Sovereign AI Fund is meant to do more than provide capital
Tom Mackenzie pressed Wise on whether the UK’s £500 million Sovereign AI Fund is meaningful in a market where especially US investment levels are much larger. Wise’s answer was that the capital is not the main point.
Wise said he had been brought in as chair over the previous six months to set up the fund, which has now launched and drawn “incredible interest” from technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, and industry. Its goal, as he described it, is to help more UK AI companies scale globally.
The fund’s money, in Wise’s account, exists partly so the taxpayer has a stake and can be rewarded if the companies succeed. The larger purpose is to make government a useful participant in the growth of AI companies.
The capital is there to make sure the taxpayer has a stake and gets rewarded when these companies go well. It's really about the other things government can do to make companies a success.
Those “other things” are practical levers: procurement, data, expertise, and help navigating the large infrastructure of the UK state. Wise’s premise is that AI is different from many other parts of technology because it is both highly significant and general. If government is going to matter in AI, its role has to include the tools it already controls, not just funding.
Wise acknowledged the historical skepticism. Many entrepreneurs, he said, would argue that government has created more challenges than support. The Sovereign AI effort is meant to change that relationship. It is also meant to bring risk-taking into government, because the model depends on the state being willing to back ambitious projects before the outcome is obvious.
Procurement is the policy lever Wise wants Britain to learn from
? james-wise treated government procurement as the clearest example of how public-sector action can help create strategic technology capability. His example was not a British company. It was SpaceX.
Wise said the UK discussion was taking place in a week when SpaceX was likely to go public, and he pointed to the company’s first government contract roughly 20 years ago: about $300 million from the US government.
He credited “a great entrepreneur and a great team,” but framed the US government contract as the early catalyst that helped get the company going. He tied that intervention to a broader national capability: the US now has more launch capability than any other country, in his account.
That example explains the ambition behind Sovereign AI. Wise wants the UK to reproduce “just a small part” of what other countries have achieved when government procurement has helped promising companies scale into strategically important ones.
The tension is that this kind of intervention invites criticism precisely because it requires the government to take risks. Wise accepted that anything done in government “rightly gets criticism.” But he treated criticism as part of the trade-off rather than a reason to avoid action. If the UK wants AI companies to scale globally from Britain, policy has to help create the conditions under which they can become strategic companies.