Potential Sciences raises eight-figure seed to rebuild quantum chemistry for GPUs
Founder Hatem Helal, an ex-Graphcore researcher behind a billion-example quantum chemistry dataset, drew Sovereign AI, seven VC firms and Stripe's Patrick Collison into the seed.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Primary source: Tech.eu
Why it matters
AI drug discovery has largely trained on the existing experimental record, which is slow and expensive to expand. Potential Sciences is betting that physics-generated data, computed cheaply enough on GPUs, can supply the next dataset - and Sovereign AI's cash-plus-compute backing shows the UK state treating chemistry infrastructure as strategic AI capacity worth owning at home.
Hatem Helal has spent his career building the software layer between quantum chemistry and modern hardware. With Potential Sciences, the London startup he founded in November 2025, he is now trying to turn that work into a frontier lab for chemistry - and on November 5th, 2026, the UK government's Sovereign AI fund and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison put money behind the attempt.…
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