BritChips Podcast: Cosine - A new angle on Sovereign AI

“What’s the dream?” I asked Yang Li, cofounder and COO of AI code generator startup Cosine.

“We want to be ten-times bigger than Deep Mind,” came the response.

Of course you do, I thought to myself - and you might too.

But can I encourage you to watch/listen to the full 30-ish minute episode of The BritChips Podcast: Cosine - A New Angle on Sovereign AI before making up your mind.

You see, the market that Cosine is addressing is not all the new stuff.

It’s all the old stuff, the legacy code that has been deeply embedded in commercial enterprises and public sector bodies for years if not decades.

And often there’s nobody left in the organisation who really understands how it works, making maintenance and upgrades an arduous and highly risk-prone exercise.

Yang believes they have the answer - an AI codegen specifically designed to maintain and enhance applications coded in arcane - even archaic - languages.

And Cosine has a USP that Yang believes the ‘usual suspect’ AI codegens can’t beat.

They see Cosine as the only end-to-end sovereign AI coding platform built, owned, and operated entirely in Britain.

The UK government is clearly a believer. Cosine was one of the first startups to be accepted into the government’s £500m Sovereign AI initiative, awarding it access to Isamabard, the UK’s most powerful supercomputer.

So, see what you think.

Podcast summary

Discover how UK-based startup Cosine is leveraging AI to transform legacy code management across defence, finance, and semiconductor industries. Cosine cofounder and COO Yang Li explains their innovative approach, funding journey, and ambitious future plans to make Britain a leader in sovereign AI.

* Yang Li introduces Cosine and their mission to build the first end-to-end sovereign AI coding platform in Britain

* The origins of Cosine and how a chance meeting at a wine bar sparked the project

* Differentiating between greenfield and brownfield projects in AI coding applications

* The technical approach behind Cosine’s language models trained specifically on legacy languages like COBOL and VHDL

* How Cosine’s platform enhances maintenance and feature addition in critical sectors

* The UK government’s £500 million sovereign AI initiative and its impact on Cosine’s growth

* Current customer deployment status and future industry targets, including semiconductor manufacturing

* Funding journey: bootstrapping, YC acceleration, US and UK investment, and strategic partnerships

* The long-term vision: making UK AI as influential as DeepMind and aiming for global leadership

* The role of Form1 Partners in supporting Cosine’s go-to-market strategy

Topics

* Yang Li’s background and Cosine’s origin story

* Differentiating greenfield vs brownfield projects

* Cosine’s approach to legacy system maintenance

* Use cases in defense, finance, and critical infrastructure

* Ensuring AI decisions are audit-trailed for regulation

* Entering the semiconductor language market

* Training models for low-level hardware languages

* Collaborations with chip industry players

* Funding origins: bootstrap, Y Combinator, and investments

* UK government’s sovereign AI program

* The capabilities enabled by government support

* Current team size and growth plans

* Key milestones: training a sovereign large language model

* Future vision: positioning Cosine as a UK AI leader

* How Cosine engaged with Form1 Partners

The BritChips Podcast is proudly sponsored by Silicon Catalyst UK, Official Partner of the government-funded ChipStartUK semiconductor incubator.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Form1 Partners in the making of this podcast. Form1, for which Anthony Miller is an advisor, is the fast-growing commercialisation partner for B2B tech scale-ups and established corporates. See here for more information about Form1.