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AI startup deepmirror has been awarded a Phase 2 Sovereign AI grant by Innovate UK to fund a project worth about £1m to expand its dataset of molecular properties, the company announced today.
deepmirror said it has been awarded a 70 per cent grant rate on the project. The company, which describes itself as building the foundation model for drug design, said the grant forms part of Innovate UK’s support for British businesses building world-leading AI technologies.
How the funding will be used
The grant will fund deepmirror’s data acquisition strategy, under which the company selects the experiments it considers most likely to improve its molecular property models.
The results expand the company’s proprietary dataset, which deepmirror said helps chemists apply AI effectively to drug design.
The award follows a Phase 1 project that deepmirror said it completed successfully in November 2025. According to the company, the second grant will allow it to take that data acquisition further as it builds what it describes as the most comprehensive dataset of molecular properties for its foundational drug design model.
Max Jakobs, co-founder and chief executive of deepmirror, said: “AI in drug discovery has a data problem: there simply aren’t broad enough datasets on which to build and train models.”
He added: “deepmirror’s rapidly growing datasets aggregate molecule data from public and private sources, deepening the available pool, and improving model performance. This grant is a key part of our data acquisition strategy, and will ultimately enable better drugs to reach the market, faster.”
Wider sovereign AI and drug discovery funding
In April, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology announced the first companies to receive backing through the Sovereign AI Unit, its £500m initiative to support homegrown AI founders.
Those first recipients included Prima Mente, which the department said is using AI to better understand and tackle brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
In May, Business Matters reported that the Sovereign AI fund had made its third investment by taking part in Isomorphic Labs’ $2.1bn funding round. Isomorphic Labs is a London drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind.
Last week, the government opened four competitions under its £100m Sovereign AI R&D procurement scheme, which is designed to make government departments early customers for British AI start-ups.
Separately, in March, London biotech Ternary Therapeutics raised £3.6m in seed funding to scale its AI platform for engineering molecular glue medicines, in a round led by daphni.
