AI software start-up PEAK:AIO lands £5m growth funding

A Manchester-based software company which claims to deliver faster and more energy-efficient AI systems has landed millions of pounds in funding from a syndicate of prominent investors.

Sky News understands that PEAK:AIO has secured the money amid a race to confront the infrastructure challenges posed by the global explosion in spending on AI and related technology advances. The company will announce the funding round publicly on Friday.

The deal is being led by Pembroke VCT, which is providing £3.7m of the £5m capital injection. PEAK:AIO has developed ultra-fast storage systems for AI workloads, and has signed up a number of institutions as customers where traditional storage technology was inhibiting their adoption of AI.

These include the NHS, King's College London, the Zoological Society of London, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, a US government research facility which received more than $5bn in funding last year. "Traditional IT has been around for decades, but AI has created demands that no one saw coming," Mark Klarzynski, co-founder and chair of PEAK:AIO.

"While many large tech companies tried to rebrand old products for this market, we have worked directly with the pioneers of AI to understand what was really needed." Other investors in the round include NPIF II - Praetura Equity Finance, which is managed by Praetura Ventures as part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II. Fred Ursell, Head of Investments at Pembroke Investment Managers, said: "Every major technology wave exposes bottlenecks that hold back progress.

"In AI, that bottleneck is storage - GPUs sit idle while data crawls in. "PEAK:AIO has built a solution from first principles that flips this equation, unlocking the full potential of AI infrastructure.".