Danyal Akarca

Danyal Akarca is co-founder and chief executive of Callosum, which he founded with Jascha Achterberg. The company was incorporated in London in November 2024. The two met while studying for PhDs at Cambridge, where their research looked at how the brain achieves intelligence by combining specialized circuits rather than repeating one kind of neuron.

Many chips, one system

Callosum applies that idea to AI infrastructure. Its software optimizes AI models and chips together, sending each workload to the hardware best suited to run it rather than assuming one model or one kind of processor will do everything. Its hardware partners include Cerebras, Rebellions of South Korea, Axelera of the Netherlands, the UK’s Tendrils and Supermicro, and it works with Oriole Networks and Lumai in the Scaling Inference Lab at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

“The industry has been betting that one model or one kind of chip will rule them all,” Akarca said in August.

Backed by the state and Atomico

Callosum came out of stealth in early 2026 with a $10.25m (£7.6m) pre-seed round. On 16 April 2026 the government’s £500m Sovereign AI Unit named it as the recipient of its first equity investment, one of seven UK AI companies it backed that day. “The future of compute is heterogeneous, and making that complexity usable is the next frontier,” Akarca said at the time.

On 20 August 2026 Callosum announced a $100m (£75m) seed round led by Atomico, with AlbionVC, Plural, DCVC and UK Sovereign AI taking part. It came less than six months after the company left stealth.

Why it matters to UK buyers

The cost of running AI, and the reliance on a single dominant chip supplier, are growing concerns for UK organizations planning AI budgets. Software that can spread work across chips from several vendors could give buyers and the cloud and data center providers that serve them more choice on price and supply. For the UK, Callosum is also a test of the government’s aim to back domestic companies in the AI stack rather than only buy compute from abroad.

Akarca has moved from a Cambridge research question to a government-backed company with a $100m seed in under two years. If its approach works at scale, UK buyers may be able to pay less for AI compute without being tied to one chip vendor.