Plural

UK @DefenceHQ selects Frankenburg to develop a low-cost air defence missile system in the UK Frankenburg Technologies has been awarded a contract under the UK Ministry of Defence’s Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors (LCADE) programme to develop cost-effective interceptor capabilities against mass drone attacks and other airborne threats. Frankenburg’s work will focus on further developing, integrating and trialling the air-launched version of our guided Mark I air defence missile. The solution builds on Project LOAD with @AirbusDefence, combining Mark I with the Airbus Bird of Prey uncrewed aircraft. The system completed its first demonstration earlier this year, with further trials planned during 2026. LCADE is the UK contribution to LEAP, a joint initiative between the UK, Poland, France, Italy and Germany to develop affordable air defence systems that can be produced in large numbers. The UK is the first LEAP partner nation to award contracts under the programme. The programme will be UK-led and supported by a prioritised UK supply chain, aligned with Frankenburg’s wider plan to establish missile production in the UK in 2027. UK MoD announcement: gov.uk/government/new… #WinTech

1. @pluralplatform is doubling down on its commitment to @HelsingAI, as part of its $1.8bn Series E, with the company now valued at $18bn.

@soundboy Great piece by @tim in today's @FT: ft.com/content/6a3a46…

“Selling DeepMind is part of why we have more serious conversations about sovereignty than we had a decade ago." - @soundboy London's new wave of exceptional AI companies will face the same choice. The outcome depends on the conditions we build now.

@FrankenburgTech Europe has spent decades without serious domestic production capacity for affordable air defence munitions. Frankenburg is changing that - applying industrial logic to a supply chain that has been too slow, too fragile and too expensive for far too long.

@FrankenburgTech This is the first site in a production system that will be replicated and scaled across multiple countries, with expansion to Estonia, the UK and Poland to follow.

@FrankenburgTech has opened a missile assembly factory in Riga, bringing it a critical step closer to producing one million affordable air defence missiles every year.

The mission behind Everlab could not be more personal. Two of the founders, Marc and Sam, lost their fathers the same way: a heart attack, too young, no warning. They built Everlab so the rest of us get the warning they didn’t.

1/ Huge milestone for Oriole Networks today as they announce a collaboration with AMD to pair AMD's GPUs with Oriole's PRISM photonic networking architecture

An INSANELY cool UK AI startup founded by an ex-DeepMinder has just announced a $50m Series B. This is the coolest, most under-the-radar UK AI company I've come across. It designs, engineers and manufacturers physical infrastructure, using AI to accelerate how new technologies are discovered and brought to market. Its first use case is AI data centres where it has already had a breakthrough with cooling fluid and signed a multiple year deal with AWS. The team behind it are absolutely CRACKED: > Jonathan Godwin (@jgodwin_ai): AI researcher who spent five years at DeepMind working on AI for science, engineering and advanced materials design > James Gin-Pollock (@gin_james): A repeat AI founder who previously sold a company to Shutterstock > Daniel Miodovnik (@Dmiodovnik): Worked across finance, government AI and advisory work to the UN Today the company - @Orbital_Ind, has announced a $50m Series B led by @soundboy of @pluralpl. VERY COOL

1/ I'm really excited to share that Plural is leading @Orbital_Ind's $50m Series B round Orbital is using AI to discover and design novel compounds from the atoms up, then engineering the products that exploit them directly.

@CallosumAI is hiring in London! We're building the infrastructure for heterogeneous compute - making many models, on many chips, behave as a single coherent, co-evolving system. Five MTS roles open across the AI infra stack. Link below!

Physical, not purely digital products are solving some of society's biggest problems. And printed circuit boards (PCBs) are vital for building pretty much every bit of electronics-driven hardware you can imagine. That's a supply chain that has drifted away from most Western countries...

UK based Rivan Industries just raised a $34,000,000 Series A to scale Europe's largest synthetic gas plant. CEO & Founder Harvey Hodd (@harveyhodd) discusses the growing viability of synthetic fuels to create a sustainable Earth: "If we're to make life sustainable on Earth, we need to capture gigatons of carbon. To do that, we need a profitable mechanism". "20% of the world's energy you can't electrify. So, we're going to have to create trillions of dollars of synthetic fuels at some point and we're going to have to do so very, very cheaply". "The thing that's changed over the last few years that makes that a viable reality is that energy cost or electricity cost has plummeted". "Suddenly for the first time in history you can get very, very, very cheap electrons you can use them for very energy intensive processes... anything where a large percentage of overall cost base is energy".

The UK in 2050. If you listen to the SF bubble you'd think it's well on the way to being a failed state. But things are cooking and Britannia won't go gentle into the night. @matthewclifford & @soundboy think there is no branch of the tech tree from which the UK could not plausibly produce the next trillion-dollar company. On this episode of Forecast 2050 Matt, the cofounder of @join_ef and Ian, co-founder of @pluralplatform we talk about what Britain's resurgence could look like over the next 25 years. - Europe's risk aversion is a bigger threat than American superiority. - Career politicians won’t survive in the new multipolar world. - Why the pro-growth movement is losing the culture war — and how to win it back. - How Britain could win the AI Age by 2050. youtu.be/cD3UtHVr99o

1/ I’m excited to share that @pluralplatform is doubling down on @Rivanindustries as part of its $34m Series A, led by the excellent team at @IQ_Capital_Fund

Metaview (@MetaviewAI) has raised a total of $51M from investors like Google Ventures (@GVteam), Plural (@pluralplatform), Village Global (@villageglobal) and Seedcamp (@seedcamp). Co-Founders Siadhal (@smagos) and Shahriar (@s16h_ ) previously worked at Uber and Palantir. Here @smagos outlines why Metaview exists and what the mission is:

❗️🇺🇦Ukrainian military personnel from the Inquisition Battalion are using 🇩🇪German kamikaze drones HF-1 and HX-2 from the company Helsing to strike 🇷🇺Russian targets on the front line.

An elite generation of founders are solving the world’s hardest problems and building the technologies that will shape Europe’s future across our most critical industries. The crux of Plural's founding thesis is starting to play out: non-obvious, hard companies matter.