Blair family link as Suzanne Ashman takes the reins at £500m Sovereign AI fund

Suzanne Ashman, one of London’s most prolific early-stage venture capitalists and the daughter-in-law of Sir Tony Blair, has been appointed managing partner of the government’s £500 million Sovereign AI fund, a vehicle designed to channel patient capital into Britain’s homegrown artificial intelligence champions and loosen the country’s dependence on Silicon Valley.

The appointment, confirmed on Tuesday, places Ashman at the helm of one of the most closely watched pots of taxpayer-backed money in the UK technology ecosystem. Launched in April, the Sovereign AI fund is chaired by James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital, and is tasked with co-investing alongside private backers in companies the Treasury views as strategically important to Britain’s long-term competitiveness.

Ashman, who married Euan Blair in 2013, has cut her teeth at two of the capital’s most respected seed and growth investors, LocalGlobe and Latitude, where she sat as a general partner. In its statement, Sovereign AI described her as “one of the most respected venture investors in the UK”, crediting her with “a decade backing the founders who have come to define a generation of British technology”.

Her track record at LocalGlobe and Latitude offers a window into the kind of bets the new fund is likely to favour. She led the firms’ investments into Motorway, the used-car marketplace now valued at more than $1 billion, and into Open Cosmos, a fast-growing satellite manufacturer and operator working on Earth-observation missions. Both are textbook examples of the scale-up stage British venture capital has historically struggled to finance without bringing in American or Asian lead investors.

The family dimension to the appointment is hard to ignore. Euan Blair has himself become a fixture of the British technology scene since founding Multiverse, now the country’s largest apprenticeship provider, in 2016. The combination of a high-profile political surname and one of the most active venture investors in London moving into a government-funded role will inevitably attract scrutiny, even though Ashman’s investment record stands comfortably on its own.

Ashman arrives just as the fund discloses its third investment. Sovereign AI has joined the latest funding round for Isomorphic Labs, the London-headquartered drug discovery business spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021 by Sir Demis Hassabis. Isomorphic announced it had raised $2.1 billion from a syndicate that includes Thrive Capital and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, alongside existing backers Alphabet and Google Ventures.

Isomorphic said the proceeds would underpin an aggressive hiring drive and help it commercialise its “drug design engine”, which uses AI to predict how candidate medicines will behave in the human body, a process the company believes can compress years out of the conventional drug development timeline. The Sovereign AI fund declined to disclose the size of its cheque, though the vehicle typically writes tickets of between £1 million and £20 million.

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Alphabet and Google, said: “Isomorphic Labs has already made extraordinary progress in harnessing AI to accelerate drug discovery and we are excited by this momentum and the early promise of the technology platform.”

For SME-watchers, the Isomorphic deal is a useful indicator of how the fund intends to deploy its money. Joséphine Kant, head of ventures at Sovereign AI, said: “Isomorphic is one of the most consequential companies being built anywhere in the world today and it’s being built in Britain. Sovereign AI exists to invest in the companies that will shape what this country becomes next.”

The political stakes are equally clear. Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, called Isomorphic’s work “AI at its very best”, arguing that it could “reshape completely how medicines are discovered, cutting years off development and giving real hope to people living with devastating diseases”.

Whether the Sovereign AI fund can move the needle for Britain’s wider population of AI-first SMEs, those without a DeepMind pedigree or a billion-dollar valuation, will be the real test of Ashman’s tenure. With £500 million to deploy and a remit to back companies the private market alone is unlikely to scale, the new managing partner has both the firepower and the political weight behind her. The question now is whether the fund can identify the next generation of British technology leaders before American capital does it first.

Read more:
Blair family link as Suzanne Ashman takes the reins at £500m Sovereign AI fund