[UK] Non-technical founder (NHS/clinical background) looking for a technical co-founder — sovereign AI infrastructure for health & life sciences
Quick context on me: I'm on the clinical/NHS side, not technical, and I'm self-funding the seed stage of this. Posting here because I want someone who's genuinely excited about the problem, not just the equity.
The gap: the UK just backed sovereign AI compute with real money — a £1.1bn AI Hardware Plan, a £500m Sovereign AI Fund with direct GPU-hour grants. At the same time, NHS and life sciences data governance is tightening hard — DSPT v8 now maps to the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework, genomics orgs got pulled into that regime in Sept 2025, and the MHRA is rewriting how AI medical devices get hosted and updated in production.
Nobody's building the thing that sits between those two trends. Generalist neoclouds (Nscale, CoreWeave, etc.) compete on raw GPU scale, not health-data compliance. Hyperscaler "UK regions" solve data residency but not real sovereignty — they're still exposed to the US CLOUD Act. And the compliance-software layer (TRE tooling etc.) mostly sits on top of someone else's infrastructure rather than owning the stack.
What we'd build: a UK-incorporated, UK-owned compute + compliance layer — GPU/AI infrastructure with DSPT/CAF-aligned, Five Safes-compatible, MHRA-AIaMD-ready governance baked in — for NHS trusts, genomics orgs, and pharma/health-tech AI vendors who can't or won't run regulated workloads on a hyperscaler or a generic GPU cloud. Starting point: lease sovereign GPU/data-centre capacity rather than build it (that's a multi-year, £100m+ problem on its own), and build the compliance/security/orchestration layer as the actual product — confidential computing, UK-sovereign key management, zero-egress-by-default environments.
What I need: a technical co-founder to own that build end-to-end — infrastructure architecture, security, and eventually the engineering team. This is a founding role, not a hire — you'd be shaping the technical roadmap from scratch, not executing someone else's spec.
Who I think this fits: solid infra/platform engineering background (GPU/cloud systems, distributed infra, or security engineering at real scale), genuine interest in confidential computing / key management / regulated data environments (health, finance, gov, defence all transfer), comfortable with pre-incorporation-level ambiguity, UK-based or willing to be.
Terms: 40% equity, standard 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff, IP assigned to the company (standard invention assignment, not held individually). I'm funding the seed round myself, so there's a real runway to build against — happy to talk compensation/salary depending on your situation once we're actually talking.
Not expecting anyone to show up knowing both GPU infra and NHS/MHRA regulation — that combination is rare by design, which is kind of the point. If the problem is interesting to you, comment or DM and I'm happy to share more (including the full strategic write-up).