Hypercritical raises £2M to modernise software engineering for heavy industry

London-based Hypercritical has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development of its foundation model and expand its engineering team. The round was led by Join Capital, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company (tiny.vc), and Plug and Play.

Hypercritical is a deeptech company that develops machine learning models to generate fully correct control software for safety- and mission-critical systems. Using a novel, logic-driven architecture that eliminates hallucinations and errors, it enables engineers in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, defence, and robotics to design and deploy control systems more quickly and cost-effectively, with mathematically guaranteed reliability.

Instead of writing code directly, engineers define the tests a system must satisfy, and Hypercritical’s AI automatically generates algorithms that meet all of them, enabling fully automated control development for highly demanding physical systems.

Its Copilots deliver immediately usable, domain-specific output, while its Autopilot produces unsupervised software that passes 100% of tests. This results in software generation that is significantly faster, more cost-efficient, and mathematically precise, essential in industries where errors are unacceptable.

Hypercritical aims to make its technology the benchmark for generating control software in safety- and mission-critical systems, and ultimately envisions its methods being incorporated into ISO standards to help modernise global software certification and compliance.

The company’s flagship product, Hyperpilot, is already in use by engineering teams to automate the development of systems that rely on control software. In parallel, key components of its technology stack, including domain-specific “copilots” such as a QA engineer and a systems engineer, have been deployed with customers, demonstrating its applicability in real-world, safety-critical environments.

Following the raise, Hypercritical plans to double its team, with funds primarily allocated to hiring and to cloud compute for training its proprietary model.

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