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

London-based deeptech firm Hypercritical has secured £2 million in pre-seed funding to advance its machine learning model development and expand its engineering team. This funding round, led by Join Capital, signifies growing investor confidence in AI-driven solutions for safety-critical software, an area of strategic importance for European digital sovereignty. Hypercritical's technology aims to revolutionize how control software is developed for sectors like automotive and aerospace, potentially reducing reliance on external software solutions. Hypercritical's core technology uses a novel, logic-driven architecture to generate control software automatically, based on engineers' defined tests. The company’s "Copilots" offer immediate, domain-specific outputs, while its "Autopilot" produces unsupervised software that passes all tests. This approach enables faster, more cost-efficient software generation with guaranteed mathematical precision, critical in industries where errors are unacceptable. The company's technology is already used by engineering teams to automate the development of systems relying on control software. With the new funding, Hypercritical plans to double its team and invest heavily in cloud computing resources for training its proprietary model. This expansion underscores the potential for AI to transform software engineering practices, particularly within the EU, and reduce reliance on third-party tools. Hypercritical is aiming to set a new standard for control software generation and hopes its methods will be integrated into ISO standards. This initiative reflects a broader effort to modernize global software certification and compliance, potentially creating a competitive advantage for European tech companies.