Imperial College spinout Monolith AI is to be acquired by CoreWeave, a specialised cloud provider for AI based in the United States.
Last year Nasdaq-listed CoreWeave opened an office in London as its European headquarters as part of a broader expansion into the continent, with the promise of £1 billion investment.
Its data centres support some of the largest deployments of high-performance GPU clusters in the world, and the infrastructure through which those clusters are consumed is designed with engineers and innovators in mind.
It is working with NVIDIA, Microsoft and Nscale to scale the UK’s AI infrastructure.
Now it has agreed to acquire Monolith, a pioneer in applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve complex physics and engineering challenges, for an undisclosed sum.
The combined companies will offer a full-stack platform for industrial and manufacturing enterprises, with the aim of enabling users to shorten R&D cycles as well as to accelerate product development and design.
“Every leader we meet across the industrial and manufacturing sectors knows AI can transform their business,” said Brian Venturo, co-founder and chief strategy officer at CoreWeave.
“What they need are the right tools to use the technology to solve intractable physics and engineering problems. Those challenges have historically slowed industrial innovation, and Monolith has closed that gap.”
Monolith was founded as a spin-off from a PhD project on uncertainty quantification, and is run by a team holding various PhDs across engineering and data science.
Backed with an Innovate UK grant to research ‘explainable AI’, it has partnered with universities like Imperial, Cambridge and ISAE-Supaéro to develop its AI capability and empower research.
Dr Richard Ahlfeld, founder and CEO of Monolith, said the firm was “founded to put AI directly into the hands of engineers – enabling them to create breakthrough technologies”.
“Joining CoreWeave will allow us to scale that mission dramatically,” he continued.
“Together we will bring powerful tools and domain expertise to thousands more builders across industries who are eager to use AI but lack the infrastructure and know-how.”
Monolith’s platform is already used by many of the world’s leading engineering companies including Nissan, BMW and Honeywell to cut months out of the product development cycle and accelerate innovation.
The firm’s tools include anomaly detection, test plan optimisation and next test recommendation, which help engineers make faster, more reliable decisions without requiring in-house AI or coding expertise.
By embedding machine learning directly into engineering workflows, it reduces physical testing that has historically slowed progress, while improving quality and accelerating innovation.