The UK's Hard Tech Job Board

Agon

Agon launched out of stealth in July 2026 with $30M across a $7M pre-seed and a $23M seed, one of the largest European defence tech seed rounds of the year. It was co-founded by chief executive Tristam Constant, who spent 13 years in British Army leadership roles before heading European defence at Applied Intuition and serving as senior director for Europe at Anduril, and Junaid Hussain, founder of defence unicorn Cambridge Aerospace and Google-backed AI and gaming company Iconic. Unity founder David Helgason chairs the company and backed the round. Agon builds synthetic battlefields where autonomous weapon systems train at machine speed against adaptive adversaries modelled on live conflict intelligence, letting counter-drone and other AI-enabled weapons rehearse scenarios at a fidelity and scale live firing ranges cannot reach. The company is headquartered in London with a second office in Berlin, and positions itself as sovereign European training infrastructure for defence AI.

Moa Technology

Moa Technology spun out of the University of Oxford's Department of Plant Sciences in 2017, founded by Professor Liam Dolan FRS and Dr Clement Champion, and is led by chief executive Dr Virginia Corless, an astrophysicist by training. The company hunts for herbicides with genuinely novel modes of action, the first new mechanisms the industry has found in roughly three decades, using plant-led discovery platforms that screen live plants rather than isolated enzymes. Moa has screened over 750,000 compounds and identified more than 70 candidate modes of action. In 2024 it signed a global commercial deal with Australian agrochemical group Nufarm covering one chemical class, which moved to its next phase in September 2025. In July 2026 Moa raised a £22.2M Series C co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Supernova Invest, with GrainInnovate, Magdalen College Oxford, Lansdowne Partners and Parkwalk Advisors participating.

Nuclear Turbines

Nuclear Turbines spun out of BAE Systems' Launchpad incubator and emerged from stealth in July 2026, founded in 2024 by former BAE principal engineer Jeremy Owston and Professor Tim Abram of the University of Manchester, in partnership with venture studio Empirical Ventures. The company replaces the steam turbine at the heart of a conventional nuclear plant with the high-temperature gas turbines used in jet engines and gas-fired power stations, heating compressed air directly using novel graphite-free reactor materials. Removing the steam circuit makes the plant compact enough to sit behind the meter on industrial sites, at data centres and in microgrids, and the founders argue it can cut generation costs to roughly a fifth of current levels. The £15M foundational round was led by IQ Capital, with Rhapsody Venture Partners, Zero Carbon Capital and Empirical Ventures, funding design validation, test rigs and the first fuel elements.

TidalSense

TidalSense was founded in Cambridge in 2013 and is led by chief executive Dr Ameera Patel, a physician and engineer, alongside co-founder and chief engineering officer Julian Carter. Its N-Tidal device reads the carbon dioxide waveform of ordinary tidal breathing, so a patient breathes normally into a handheld sensor for 75 seconds instead of performing the forced manoeuvre spirometry demands, and machine learning models classify the resulting curve. A clinician can assess four to six patients an hour rather than roughly one, and any healthcare professional can run the test after ten minutes of training. In March 2025 N-Tidal Diagnose became the first non-spirometry AI diagnostic device to receive CE marking under EU MDR (Class IIa) for COPD. It entered NHS service in September 2025 and has raised $40M in total, including $11M in grants and a $19M round led by Cross-Border Impact Ventures in July 2026.

CuspAI

CuspAI was founded in Cambridge in 2024 by Dr Chad Edwards and Professor Max Welling, the machine learning researcher who previously led Qualcomm's AI research in Europe. The company builds generative models that search for materials meeting a specified functional brief, then validates candidates in the lab, targeting semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing. In July 2026 it launched the AI Materials Foundry, a network of more than 45 partners including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research, pairing computational discovery with physical synthesis and exclusive dataset partnerships. The $450M Series B was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA at a $2.6bn valuation, up from $520M nine months earlier, taking total funding past $580M across a 2024 seed and a 2025 Series A.

Greenjets

Greenjets was founded in 2022 by chief executive Anmol Manohar and chief technology officer Dr Guido Monterzino, and builds propulsion for uncrewed and electric aircraft, with a portfolio running from electric ducted fans to geared turbofan engines. Products include the Sycamore 160 and Aspen 212, designed for higher efficiency, greater speed and a lower acoustic signature than conventional designs, and the team draws on Rolls-Royce, General Electric, BAE Systems and Formula 1 experience. The company sells to NATO, the UK MoD and the German MoD, and was selected under the MoD's Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors programme to build a British low-cost drone interceptor. It grew from 160 to more than 250 staff and expanded UK facilities from 12,000 to nearly 70,000 square feet. The $40M Series A was led by Blossom Capital, with the NATO Innovation Fund, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, Tanglin Ventures and NSFO Family Office.