Made in London, built for the world

With a storied history of innovation and global trade, London continues to attract a vibrant startup community. Find out what draws startup founders to the city, how they’re scaling on AWS, as well as how AWS Activate helps them build and grow while reducing costs.

For centuries, London has been a gateway to global trade and finance. Its merchants and mariners once mapped routes that crossed seas and carried goods, capital, and ideas between continents. Today, the city retains its position as a center of international commerce. Yet networks being mapped are increasingly digital, powered by data, AI, and cloud infrastructure, and the people navigating them are startup founders building companies with global reach.

London’s startup community is enriched by a strong talent base, spanning research and academia, technology, and enterprise, and it commands serious investment. In March 2026, VC funding reached £2.14 billion, a 21 percent increase year-on-year. As a fintech hub and with a trusted regulatory environment, London lends credibility to emerging businesses. And the city’s creativity and cultural diversity foster an environment where ideas and the people behind them can thrive.

Following stops in New York, San Francisco, and Seoul,  AWS's globe-trotting tour of startup hubs arrives in London. Here, we meet founders and team members of London-based firms, to discover what attracted them to the city, how they're overcoming challenges and levelling up with competitors, and why partnering with AWS is helping them grow and scale.

A place where big things are possible

London’s history as an engine of innovation continues to draw founders hoping to build on this legacy. For Justina Chung, VP, Bessemer Venture Partners, the city’s startup community and deep technical foundations made it a natural base for identifying and backing ambitious companies. “When you think about what's being built here and the big things that have been invented here, that’s incredible,” says Chung, pointing to breakthroughs such as IVF, fiber optic cables, the modern-day internet, and AI. “This has always been a place where big things were built and big things were possible.”

These strengths continue to shape the course of innovation. “Natural advantages are in AI,” she continues. “Because of the infrastructure and the regulations in London, it's always been an innovator in fintech as well in open banking. This fabric of people, technology and infrastructure positions London at the forefront of creating some of the most interesting technologies that are being exported to the world.”

Hirsh Pithadia, CEO and Co-founder of Valyu, was attracted by London’s global outlook and diverse talent pool. “Being in London means that your product, how you think about building and serving the market, has to be global from day zero,” he says. “Our users are based in Asia, Europe, the US, which forces us to think from a global perspective.”  The startup is building search and retrieval infrastructure for AI, enabling extraction and deep research to support sectors such as finance and legal law.

Valyu’s team reflects the city, Pithadia explains, “we've got people from Singapore, New Zealand, Nigeria. I'm from Kenya. We've got people from the Midlands and London.” This diversity affords different perspectives, and “when you're working on foundational problems, that matters.”

London’s diversity and location have also helped PolyAI “enormously” says its Co-founder and SVP of Engineering, Eddy Su. “We are able to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures. That’s helped us bring a lot of different perspectives to our thinking.” PolyAI started as a spinoff from Cambridge University in 2017 and has since grown into a series B company, raising £200 million from investors in the US and UK. The benefits of launching and running a business from London, Su continues, are threefold: “the time zone/location, the access to talent, and also having enterprise clients at your door.”

London’s global outlook is shaping how founders are building their companies but translating that ambition into reality requires something more. To serve international markets, startups need infrastructure that is reliable and scalable, and to work with partners who facilitate access to new markets and global communities.

Turning global ambition into reality

For the founders featured here, that foundation is AWS. Its global reach allows teams to deploy, operate, and optimize their products across regions, supporting customers wherever they are while maintaining performance and resilience. For Su, this has been critical to PolyAI’s growth. “We deploy our agents across different AWS instances across the world, including the US, UK, Europe, and many other countries. Reliability and stability have been the key thing for us, and AWS has been very reliable on that front.”

PolyAI, like many of our other founders, has been building on AWS from the start, deploying a range of solutions and benefiting from services that adapt and scale in line with growth. Apoha, for instance, began working with AWS to support its data storage needs. The company deploys sensory intelligence to understand and predict molecular behavior, requiring significant levels of compute and storage.

“Our customers have very expensive samples that they're sending us, molecules which they have built over a number of months or a number of years,” explains Anshika Srivastava, Apoha’s Co-founder and COO. “To be able to run these experiments is very hard. To depend on this data and to be able to access it many months or many years down the line, is why we depend on AWS infrastructure.” This infrastructure includes solutions like AWS Batch, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon EC2: “we are essentially running our entire pipeline on AWS at this point,” says Srivastava.

Removing obstacles to scaling

Working closely with a number of London startups, Bessemer’s Chung understands the role that access to technology plays in helping startups launch and grow. “When you invest in early-stage companies, the most important thing you can do apart from writing a check is to remove the friction to the path to scaling for the company. And that's where the relationship with AWS comes in,” she says. “It’s very important to our portfolio companies that from day one they can access the infrastructure, the compute, and the experts within AWS to remove the obstacles to scaling.”

This support is consistent across the startup journey, from pre-seed through to later-stage companies, and can be decisive at critical moments of growth. “For a founder, that can be the difference between winning an enterprise deal at the early stage,” says Chung. “Right off the bat, you don't need to worry about getting all these things in line. You have one place where you can access everything, from infrastructure to compute to experts.”

Accessing and deploying solutions is only one part of the equation. For startups, long-term, sustainable success also depends on how that technology is applied and how it helps differentiate a business in a competitive marketplace. London is particularly demanding in this respect. The bar for innovation is high and founders are required to think carefully about how they stand out as much as how they scale.

Raising the bar in a competitive city

“Insurance in the UK is a very competitive industry,” says Andi Hueck, Head of ML Engineering at Zego, a motor insurance platform. One of the great things about London, he says, is the density of organizations that operate in the city, providing “a good opportunity for information to flow.” However, among these organizations are a number of Zego’s competitors.

That competitive pressure makes the effective use of technology, and the right choice of partner, a defining factor in differentiation. “It’s really important to price accurately, but also to react to what the competitors are doing,” says Hueck. “For that, we need for a lot of machine learning models that get updated very frequently. We found Amazon SageMaker pipelines to be a good solution to help a pretty small ML engineering team manage a large number of models.”

On the telematics side, Zego’s app generates significant volumes of real-time customer data, requiring robust infrastructure to process and act on it effectively. “AWS has been great in helping us process this,” says Hueck. Alongside the technology, Zego and our other startups also emphasize the importance of personalized support and guidance from AWS in helping them stand out and succeed in a highly competitive London market.

“What surprised me about working with AWS is how easy it is to get support for when we have ideas to do something,” says Hueck. “For example, when we are running a new POC, we go to AWS and get help and advice from solution architects on the problem we're trying to solve.”

This collaborative approach to problem-solving is helping Zego move closer to achieving its “big growth ambitions,” says Hueck. “AWS solutions are very scalable, so as we're looking to grow as a business, grow our customers, and write a billion pounds of premium, I feel very confident that AWS will be able to support us.”

Securing investment & accessing support

For early-stage startups, standing out in one of the world’s most active startup environments also means competing for the capital needed to grow. One of the challenges of building a business in London, says Apoha’s Srivastava, is “accessing the investor base. There is an amazing investor base here, but we also want to be close to later-stage investors.” Securing investment is a challenge in any market, but in a city where ambition is abundant, founders must work to demonstrate traction and credibility.

To help ease this pressure, many of our startups have relied on initiatives like AWS Activate. The program provides tools, AWS Credits, and resources that help founders build and grow while reducing upfront infrastructure costs, freeing them up to focus on what matters to investors: progress and demonstrating readiness to scale. Apoha, for instance, had early access to AWS Credits, which “really moved the needle for us,” says Srivastava. “It helped us build the very first infrastructure for our customers. And that has taken us to the point at which we are able to run real programs on the infrastructure.”

AWS Activate also proved “foundational” for Valyu, says Pithadia. “For a company that's building AI search at the scale of the web, having access to compute and storage budget makes all the difference, and helped us actually build a product.” Bessemer also notes the importance of AWS Activate to the startups the company works with, especially those at the early stage of their journey.

“You can access many different things across the AWS suite, whether it's compute, access to Amazon Bedrock and foundational models, infrastructure, storage, or databases,” says Chung. “So from the start, you don’t have to worry about building your own stack, and instead can focus on getting to market and hiring the best employees.”

An active community building together

In addition to credits and technical support, the initiative also enables members to connect with a network of founders through events and peer-to-peer learning. In London, that sense of community is already embedded in the fabric of the city. For many of our startups, the proximity to a thriving, supportive startup environment is one of London’s greatest strengths. Pithadia recounts Valyu’s early days “when we were so bootstrapped and we used to work from a lot of startups’ offices.”

Being surrounded by like-minded founders had it benefits. “There is definitely this element of startups helping each other,” he continues. “If you’re in this ecosystem, working on genuine problems, you find that interesting conversations just tend to happen.”

Zego’s Hueck also highlights London’s “active” and “tech-driven” startup community. “There are a lot of events where information is shared and where you can speak to people that are doing similar things to you,” he says. “You can exchange information, upskill, and keep up to date with what's going on.”

For Apoha, London’s community “is what drives us,” says Srivastava. “Whether it's the startup community, the builder community or the customer community; we're all just building together and really trying to solve fundamental problems.”