Exclusive: Antler backs 10 UK startups with £2.2M as over a third build physical AI and industrial automation

Antler has put £2.2 million into 10 UK pre-seed startups, and more than a third of them are building physical AI or industrial automation tools. Each company got about £210,000 at the start, split between debt and equity. That is a bigger cheque than Antler has written before in this market, and it is landing in a batch of founders who are aiming at messy, real-world industries rather than another app for people already staring at screens all day.

The group includes Cloop, a to-do list that does the work itself; Lir Labs, which automates biological water treatment; Marco, a learning layer for physical intelligence; Ninopay, which helps families spread childcare costs while providers get paid upfront; Picnic, an AI assistant for product teams; Plenex, which lets users query the physical world; siliXon, which turns natural-language requests into working electronics; and Sonura, a generative AI tool for music creation. Two of the startups are still in stealth. Antler said some of the money also went directly into teams it had already been working with.

Hannah Leach, a partner at Antler, said the firm did not begin with a thesis around physical AI. The founders pulled the themes together themselves, even if the companies are now grouped under physical AI and agentic AI. She said they are drawn to analog industries because competition is thinner there, even though selling into businesses that are not tech-native means longer sales cycles and more work upfront. The upside, in her view, is stickiness: if a startup gets into those established workflows, it can become hard to rip out.

Antler’s slice of the market is also getting more selective and more expensive. Earlier rounds were smaller: £840,000 across seven startups, then £1.7 million across 14 startups in spring 2025, according to Vestbee. TFN reported in August 2025 terms of £125,000 for 8.5% equity, an £85,000 convertible note, and up to £330,000 pre-committed for the next round, which lines up with the bigger average cheque this time. Leach says startups are moving faster now, changing direction more often, and that means Antler is betting less on today’s product than on how fast the founders can absorb feedback and rebuild.

The background mix is not the usual all-Big-Tech cast. Antler says 30% of the founders have worked at major tech companies, 60% have been in early-stage startups, and 25% come from finance, with some overlap. It also says six founders came from Big Tech and 13 have technical backgrounds. And the timing matters: Dealroom says UK startups raised $17 billion in the first half of 2026, with AI taking $12.6 billion, but only 12% of British startups that reach seed make it to Series A. That is the cliff these teams still have to climb.