In a converted warehouse near King's Cross, engineers at Isomorphic Labs spent the spring building on Google DeepMind's protein-folding breakthroughs, refining a system designed to compress years of drug discovery into months. Nine miles away, a maternity unit was still working through the recommendations of a safety review published the previous year, its staff stretched across wards that had not seen equivalent investment in a generation. Both are part of the same country's health story in 2026, though only one of them appears in the funding tables that Tracxn published this month, showing UK artificial intelligence companies raising $9.6bn in the first half of the year, a 360 per cent jump on the same period in 2025. Five companies accounted for 84 per cent of the total raised, and London alone captured 98 per cent of it, up from 93 per cent in the second half of last year. Oxford managed just over $100m, while Cambridge raised under $20m. Isomorphic Labs' $2.1bn round in May, backed by Thrive Capital, Alphabet and the UK's newly launched sovereign AI fund, was pitched explicitly at accelerating drug discovery, with partnerships already in place with Novartis, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. However, the distance between a well-funded London drug design engine and a therapy reaching an NHS formulary runs through the MHRA's approval capacity, through NICE's appraisal timelines, and through an NHS procurement system that has struggled for