Published: June 23, 2026 at 2:32 pm
One of the world’s top investors has backed a UK-headquartered AI company in a $50 million round of funding as it launches into the United States.
Partly was co-founded by CEO Levi Fawcett in New Zealand in 2020 and has built the world’s only AI foundation model purpose-built for the automotive repair supply chain.
Fawcett is a rocket scientist who managed and developed hardware simulations for the Electron Rocket at Rocket Lab USA before co-founding Partly. Following years of research, he launched the product into the UK market and relocated the firm’s headquarters to London.
“The UK was pretty much from day one our biggest market,” Fawcett tells BusinessCloud.
Partly’s Interpreter model is the result of five years of training on human feedback and synthetic data, more than 50 manufacturer agreements, and continuous training on live data.
So why has DST Global Partners backed it – and what attracted Fawcett to the investor?