The UK's Hard Tech Job Board

ARX Robotics

ARX Robotics is a Munich-based defence technology company developing autonomous ground vehicles and software platforms for European armed forces. Founded in 2021 by former German Bundeswehr officers Marc Wietfeld, Maximilian Wied, and Stefan Röbel, the company builds modular unmanned ground systems including the Gereon tracked reconnaissance vehicle and Hector scalable autonomous platform, alongside Mithra OS, an AI-powered system for modernising legacy military fleets. ARX systems are already deployed in Ukraine and along NATO's eastern flank, and the company is field testing with British Armed Forces. In 2025, ARX announced a £45M investment in a UK manufacturing facility expected to produce 1,800 autonomous systems annually. The company raised a €42M Series A led by HV Capital.

Graphcore

Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI semiconductor company founded in 2016 by serial semiconductor entrepreneurs Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles. Toon previously led XMOS and Picochip, while Knowles co-founded Element14 (acquired by Broadcom) and Icera (acquired by NVIDIA for $435M). The company developed Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), novel AI accelerators designed from the ground up for machine learning workloads, alongside the proprietary Poplar graph programming framework. Graphcore raised $767M in total funding, reaching a $2.77B valuation, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Amadeus, Microsoft, and others. In July 2024, SoftBank Group acquired Graphcore for approximately $500M to $600M. The company continues to operate from Bristol with plans to expand its UK headcount to 750.

Hadean

Hadean is a London-based deep tech company founded in 2015, developing spatial computing and AI simulation software for defence and resilience applications. Its platform powers large-scale synthetic environments for planning, training, and decision-making, with products spanning populAI (simulation and wargaming), dominAI (command and control), and optimAI (AI-driven intelligence). Customers include the UK Ministry of Defence, British Army, NATO, BAE Systems, Microsoft, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Palantir. The company raised a $30M Series A in 2022 led by Molten Ventures with participation from Epic Games, Tencent, In-Q-Tel, 2050 Capital, and Entrepreneur First, followed by a £2.1M investment from the British Business Bank in 2026 alongside Booz Allen Ventures.

PhysicsX

PhysicsX was founded in 2020 in London by Robin Tuluie and Jacomo Corbo, both veterans of elite motorsport engineering. Tuluie previously led R&D at the Mercedes and Renault (Alpine) Formula 1 teams and served as Vehicle Technology Director at Bentley, while Corbo co-founded QuantumBlack (later acquired by McKinsey) and worked as a Formula 1 chief race strategist. The company builds an AI-native simulation platform that embeds physics neural operators directly into engineering workflows, predicting how products will behave in seconds rather than the hours or days traditional simulation demands. PhysicsX serves aerospace and defence, semiconductors, automotive, materials, and energy customers, and has partnered with Siemens and NVIDIA on data centre power infrastructure. The company has raised more than $450M to date, including a $135M Series B led by Atomico in 2025 and a £225M Series C led by Temasek and M&G Investments in 2026.

NewOrbit Space

NewOrbit was founded in 2021 in Reading by chief executive Anatolii Papulov and chief technology officer Ruslan Rakhimov, a former senior spacecraft researcher. The company develops satellites for Very Low Earth Orbit, the 200 to 300km band historically reserved for spy satellites and the International Space Station because conventional spacecraft cannot hold altitude there against atmospheric drag. NewOrbit answers this with a proprietary air-breathing propulsion system that lets its satellites sustain these ultra-low orbits for up to five years, enabling drone-resolution Earth imagery and direct-to-phone connectivity at a fraction of the cost of higher constellations. In June 2026 the company raised an $18.5M Series A led by Voyager Ventures, with Atlantic.vc, Lifeline Ventures, Illusian, and Custos participating, alongside angels including former NVIDIA chief scientist David Kirk. The funding supports NewOrbit first mission and a UK satellite production facility.

Gigaton

Gigaton was founded in 2020 as Carbon Re, the first university spinout jointly backed by University College London and the University of Cambridge, drawing on UCL Energy Institute and Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing. Co-founded by Daniel Summerbell, Buffy Price, Sherif Elsayed-Ali, and Dr Aidan O Sullivan, and now led by chief executive Josh Vernon, the company rebranded to Gigaton in 2024. It builds self-learning AI control software that uses deep reinforcement learning to simulate, predict, and autonomously control complex industrial processes, cutting fuel costs and carbon emissions. Starting with the cement pyroprocess, one of the hardest industries to decarbonise, Gigaton is expanding into steel, glass, and chemicals, aiming to run the fully autonomous plants that legacy control systems cannot. In June 2026 it raised a $26M (£19.3M) Series A led by Plural, building on earlier backing from Clean Growth Fund, the UCL Technology Fund, and Cambridge Enterprise.