Potential Sciences has raised an eight-figure seed round with backing from the UK government’s Sovereign AI venture fund. The British startup is building AI for drug discovery that learns from the laws of physics instead of past lab experiments.
The company announced the round on 5 November, and the package pairs cash with access to national supercomputing. The startup did not disclose the exact amount raised.
Learning chemistry from physics, not lab results
Drug discovery AI usually learns from data gathered in real world lab experiments. That record is slow and costly to expand, and it limits what models can learn about new molecules.
Potential Sciences takes a different route. It rebuilds quantum chemistry, the maths that predicts how molecules behave, so it runs on modern GPUs. The company says this makes the calculations needed to design chemicals 100 times cheaper than at present.
The approach could open up research into treatments for diseases that are now too rare or too costly to study, including cancer and Parkinson’s. That is the promise the UK government is backing with cash and compute.
A founder who built the dataset
Potential Sciences was founded in November 2025 by Hatem Helal, a former research scientist at Graphcore. At Graphcore he co-authored QM1B, a dataset of one billion quantum chemistry calculations covering 1.09 million drug-like molecules.
“AI for drug discovery has learned almost everything the existing experimental record can teach it. The next leap needs new data, and the laws of physics can supply it, as long as your software can use modern hardware,” said Hatem Helal, founder and CEO of Potential Sciences.
Who backed the round
Sovereign AI is backing the company as an investor in the seed round. Other backers include Twin Path Ventures, Odyssey, Portfolio Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, rule30, Nauta Capital and Lightfield Equity.
Angel investors include Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, and Chris Gibson, co-founder and former CEO of Recursion. Andrew Fitzgibbon and James Hawkins will support the company as advisers.
The round is the latest bet by Sovereign AI, the government’s venture fund for early-stage AI companies. The fund also backs companies with computing time, and Potential Sciences will get access to the AI Research Resource, the national suite of supercomputers that includes Isambard-AI in Bristol.
Cash and compute from the state
The announcement came a week after the Budget, in which the Chancellor confirmed a further £140 million for Sovereign AI. That includes £60 million for the fund’s investments and £80 million for research and development procurement.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said the startup is grasping an opportunity Britain is well placed to seize, using deep expertise in data, science and computing to open a new wave of medical discovery. Sovereign AI investment partner Joséphine Kant called Helal a formidable founder with unapologetic ambition.
Potential Sciences is not the only young company raising money to apply AI to drug discovery. Sightera Biosciences raised €3 million earlier for its own work in the field.
