Wonderful AI, a Dutch-Israeli start-up that helps companies adopt artificial intelligence, has opened an office in London and plans to recruit “hundreds” of people, as it targets businesses that have yet to show measurable returns from the technology.

The company’s new site is on St Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden. Wonderful did not set a timeline for the recruitment.

The 18-month-old business was valued at $5bn after raising $550m in a funding round announced on 2 September, backed by investors including Salesforce, Index Ventures and Insight Partners. It now employs more than 700 people across 35 countries.

Jason du Preez, Wonderful’s UK chief operating officer, said the funding gave the company the “muscle to invest materially in this market … we see a huge market opportunity in the UK”.

Targeting the gap on returns

Du Preez said many UK companies had moved quickly on AI but had yet to demonstrate what it had delivered.

“Many companies here in the UK actually have very active AI agendas and were very early to adopt some of the tools but are yet to show tangible, coherent stories on ROI [return on investment],” he said.

Research published by Accenture in April found that only one in ten UK organisations had successfully scaled AI or embedded it into core operations. Matt Prebble, chief executive of Accenture UK and Ireland, has since said that nine in ten companies are still waiting for AI to pay off.

Adoption itself has risen. According to the Office for National Statistics, the proportion of UK businesses with 10 or more employees using at least one AI technology rose from around 12 per cent to around 35 per cent between late 2023 and 2026. A separate PwC study found that UK businesses were falling behind on AI investment and returns compared with global leaders.

How the model works

Wonderful places its engineers directly inside client businesses, where they help design custom AI software on top of the company’s own platform. That platform sits between businesses and the underlying AI models.

The platform is model agnostic, meaning it can route queries to a range of different AI models. “We work with all the frontier companies and we enable our customers to choose which models are used for specific purposes,” du Preez said.

Wonderful’s router decides which model is best suited to a given task, taking into account factors such as data sensitivity and cost.

The company also trains clients to build and expand their technology systems independently, and allows all customers to export any intellectual property built on the platform, which it says protects against vendor lock-in.

“We’re not trying to create some sort of long-term dependency on Wonderful,” du Preez said. “I think that provides strong support for the sovereignty story, in that we’re giving customers choice and no lock-ins.”

Regulated sectors in focus

Du Preez said Wonderful was “agnostic to sector”, but added that he was “very excited about the regulated industries”, including insurance, banking and telecoms, as well as life sciences and healthcare.

The opening adds to a run of AI companies expanding in the capital. OpenAI earlier this year leased its first permanent London office in King’s Cross, with capacity for 544 staff.

Read the full article →