Luffy AI, an Abingdon startup building what it calls neuroplastic AI for the real-time control of physical machines, has raised £8.1m in a Series A round, the company said on Tuesday.
The round was led by BGF, which bills itself as the most active equity investor in the UK and Ireland, and the money is earmarked for turning pilots into commercial deployments.
Luffy is a spinout in the fullest sense. Its founders, Dr Matthew Carr and Dr Alex Meakins, are former nuclear physicists from the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and the company still sits on the Culham Campus near Oxford, a site better known for fusion research than for the kind of university deeptech spinouts now spilling out of it.
The pitch turns on a problem the wider AI boom has mostly stepped around. Large language and image models lean on vast data, cloud compute, and constant connectivity, none of which suits a pump or a conveyor belt on a factory floor, and it is a world away from the physical-AI bets that have drawn Britain’s biggest cheques, such as Wayve’s $1bn round.
Luffy’s answer is a different kind of network. Its sparse neural networks are trained in simulation, sidestepping the scramble for large training sets that conventional deep learning demands, then refined against the real machine, an approach the company says can be up to 400 times more efficient than traditional deep learning.
