The UK’s AI sector has more than tripled in value in a year, with firms including Nscale and ElevenLabs now worth a combined £41bn. Research from the Hurun UK Unicorn Index shows the country’s nine AI unicorns have surged to a combined valuation of more than £40bn, driven by Nscale, now worth £11.3bn, and ElevenLabs, valued at £8.5bn. AI has overtaken fintech as Britain’s fastest-growing area of private firm creation. The UK is now home to 70 unicorns worth a combined £228bn, up 47 per cent over the past year, pushing Britain ahead of India as the world’s third-largest unicorn nation behind only the US and China. Nscale, a London-based AI infrastructure firm, has raised billions of dollars, recruited former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and ex-deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to its board, and positioned itself as a leading European AI compute provider. ElevenLabs has signed enterprise customers including Deutsche Telekom, Revolut and Klarna, surpassed $500m in annual recurring revenue, and attracted investors including BlackRock, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures and Deutsche Telekom. However, the report warns that only two UK unicorns floated this year compared with 35 in the United States, while domestic pension funds allocate just 0.007 per cent of assets to venture capital.