Rosalyn Moran

Professor Rosalyn Moran co-founded Stanhope AI with Professor Karl Friston of UCL’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology, and leads it as chief executive. The company was incorporated in London in March 2021. A computational neuroscientist, she was previously deputy director of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence at King’s College London. The company is a spinout from UCL and King’s.

A different kind of model

Stanhope AI builds its models on active inference, which comes from Friston’s free energy principle: the idea that brains constantly predict what will happen next and update their picture of the world when they are wrong. Instead of training once on a large static dataset, as large language models do, its systems keep learning from what they perceive as they act. The company says its models are explainable and small enough to run on the device itself, using little data and energy.

That makes the target market physical: drones, robots, industrial automation, embedded devices and defense systems, where a machine has to cope with conditions nobody trained it for. In 2024 the company said its software was being tested on delivery drones and autonomous machines with partners including the Royal Navy and Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation.

Funding to move into field trials

In March 2024 Stanhope raised a £2.3m seed round led by the UCL Technology Fund. In February 2026 it closed a further $8m (£5.9m) seed round led by Frontline Ventures, with Paladin Capital Group and the Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund joining, and UCL Technology Fund and MMC Ventures following on. The company said the money would scale its partnerships and field trials in 2026, and that its technology was being tested in autonomous drone and robotics applications with international partners.

“We’re moving from language-based AI to intelligence that possesses the ability to act to understand its world – a system with a fundamental agency,” Moran said when the round closed.

Why it matters to UK buyers

For UK defense, aerospace and industrial buyers, Stanhope offers a UK-built route to autonomy that does not depend on a large language model running in someone else’s cloud. On-device models that adapt in real time suit settings with patchy connectivity and strict rules about where data goes. Integrators building drone, robotics and automation systems for those customers are the likely route to market.

Moran has turned two decades of academic work into a funded company with military and industrial partners testing its software. The field trials planned for 2026 will show how far a brain-inspired model can go outside the lab.