Last Updated: 8 May 2025
London-based Doubleword, formerly known as TitanML, has announced a £9 million ($12 million) Series A funding round. The round was led by Dawn Capital, a prominent B2B software investor, with additional support from K5 Global (Tokyo Black) and influential figures in the AI community, including Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, Dataiku CEO Florian Douetteau, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.
This investment underscores the growing demand for efficient, self-hosted AI solutions in the enterprise sector. Doubleword's platform addresses the complexities of deploying AI models at scale, offering a streamlined approach for businesses seeking greater control over their AI infrastructure.
As AI becomes increasingly integral to business operations, the inference stage—where AI models process data to generate outputs—has emerged as a critical bottleneck. Many enterprises face challenges in building and maintaining the necessary infrastructure for efficient inference, leading to increased costs and operational complexities.
Doubleword's self-hosted inference platform offers a solution by enabling enterprises to deploy AI models—be it open-source, proprietary, or fine-tuned—without the need for extensive infrastructure development. This approach allows businesses to maintain control over their AI deployments, ensuring data privacy and operational efficiency.
"Enterprises creating specific business-critical AI would gladly self-host, if “expertise” and “cost” didn’t sound like double trouble. Doubleword flips the script, making self-hosting effortless and reshaping the market for enterprise customers."
Florian Douetteau, CEO of Dataiku
With the new funding, Doubleword plans to expand its global team and enhance its platform's capabilities. The company aims to address more aspects of the inference problem, making AI deployment even more accessible for enterprises.
Meryem Arik, Co-Founder and CEO of Doubleword, stated, "Our customers want to build AI-powered applications—not AI infrastructure. We eliminate the heavy lifting of inference at scale so they can go from idea to production faster, without racking up technical debt."
The company has already established partnerships with industry leaders like Snowflake and Dataiku, indicating a strong market presence and the potential for further growth.
Founded by Meryem Arik, Dr. Jamie Dborin, and Dr. Fergus Finn, Doubleword originated from academic research in quantum machine learning at University College London. The founders identified that techniques used in their research could significantly improve AI inference performance.
Haakon Overli, General Partner at Dawn Capital, remarked, "Doubleword is the most exciting startup in this space, and we're extremely excited to be supporting Meryem, Jamie, Fergus, and the team as they take the company to the next level. The team has a market-leading product and has proven they can flawlessly execute to deliver for global customers."
Beyond Dawn Capital and K5 Global, Doubleword's investor roster includes notable AI entrepreneurs and executives from leading companies such as Hugging Face, Dataiku, and Datadog. This diverse and experienced group of backers provides Doubleword with valuable insights and support as it continues to innovate in the AI space.
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle commented, "Doubleword's work is helping set the standard for how companies can adopt AI quickly and efficiently, allowing their workers and customers to thrive in the age of AI."
