AI Founders Survey: A call for AI startups to have their say on AI policy
The Startup Coalition’s Vinous Ali talks to Appraise about their efforts to map the UK’s AI ecosystem.
The Startup Coalition is the policy voice for UK startups and scaleups. It focuses on improving the policy environment and ensuring the UK is the best place to start and scale. Vinous Ali is the organisation’s deputy executive director, and a highly-respected policy analyst well-known in tech circles.
How has the Startup Coalition approached AI policy and advocacy?
As an organisation we’ve always been focused on policy around issues like access to capital, talent, and the broader regulatory environment. There are a lot of players in the AI ecosystem, so we’re very keen to be focused on specific policy outcomes.
When the AI hype took over in 2022 following the release of ChatGPT, one of the challenges we found – due to AI being a general-purpose technology – is that it was hard to get startups to coalesce behind a single thing.
This changed in January 2025 with the publication of the AI Opportunities Action Plan. All of a sudden, we had 50 recommendations that the government had committed to, and our role became how can we help them execute on them – and fast. We’re starting to see how the money is being allocated, and we can start working out where startups fit in.
How would you describe the UK’s AI ecosystem currently?
The ecosystem is flourishing, particularly in the application layer. Actually, as it happens, we’re currently working on an AI index, to be published in January, to track the most exciting AI companies in the UK. The plan is to map the 1,000 fastest growing AI startups.
And alongside that we’re currently running a survey for AI founders. We’re interested in finding out what’s happening on the ground for them. What’s working and what’s not? How are they finding the funding environment right now? Where are the bottlenecks? What do they need?
The more specific, the more unglamorous the better! We want to walk in their shoes, and hear the things that might not make it into a press release but would really make a difference to their ability to grow. We recently made some recommendations on the need for better AI infrastructure, for example. What else do they need?
How would you characterise the AI policy debate in this country?
As a country, we’ve taken quite a sensible approach to AI regulation, certainly compared to the EU and its AI Act. Brussels made the bet that they could do GDPR again, become the global gold-standard. But already we’re seeing them rowing back. Putting process ahead of practice is always likely to trip you up.
In the UK, we just set out some principles, and then proceeded vertical by vertical. And it looks like this approach has proven to be right. What’s the problem we’re trying to solve and then trying to find pragmatic solutions? Like, the AI Growth Lab is a brilliant initiative for example.
The broader conversations, about existential threats and the like, they don’t really have any impact on our day-to-day conversations. Maybe they would in a global context, or across multilateral forums. But on the ground there’s plenty of work to be getting on with, and I’m happy to focus on that!