Stanhope AI – a company applying decades of neuroscience research to teach machines how to make human-like decisions in the real world – has raised £2.3m in seed funding led by the UCL Technology Fund.

Creator Fund also participated, along with, MMC Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and Rockmount Capital and leading angel investors. 

Stanhope AI was founded as a spinout from University College London, supported by UCL Business, by three of the most eminent names in neuroscience and AI research – CEO Professor Rosalyn Moran (former Deputy Director of King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence), Director Karl Friston, Professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Technical Advisor Dr Biswa Sengupta (MD of AI and Cloud products at JP Morgan Chase). 

By using key neuroscience principles and applying them to AI and mathematics, Stanhope AI is at the forefront of the new generation of AI technology known as ‘agentic’ AI.  The team has built algorithms that, like the human brain, are always trying to guess what will happen next; learning from any discrepancies between predicted and actual events to continuously update their “internal models of the world.” Instead of training vast LLMs to make decisions based on seen data, Stanhope agentic AI’s models are in charge of their own learning. They autonomously decode their environments and rebuild and