The New Palo Alto Guidebook: London’s New Square Mile
If you’ve never visited London before, you might be thrilled to hear of the exciting new neighbourhood that’s recently emerged, a few Tube stops away from the City.
Its name, ‘The Knowledge Quarter’, adorns property billboards and newspaper headlines (in recent weeks across The FT, The Observer, The Telegraph, and more), and speaks to the magnetic draw the area has to Europe’s academic and technological elite. Over the past few months, the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus have confirmed plans to set up shop in the area surrounding King’s Cross, St Pancras, and Euston, joining an already illustrious community that includes Google DeepMind, Meta, Wayve, Synthesia, and AstraZeneca.
But Londoners, and those of us who have been based in the neighbourhood for nearly a decade, will know that King’s Cross’ renaissance has been years, if not decades, in the making. A result not of Big Tech speculation but of coordination and collaboration between some of the UK’s leading scientists, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and investors.
We prefer the name ‘the New Square Mile’, a nod to our past, to London’s former financial centre, and an ambitious vision for what we believe this area will become, and will be remembered as.
“King’s Cross remains a salutary example of what British innovation and enterprise can achieve with far-sighted policy and both public and private investment. It was difficult then to imagine what it could become and equally hard now to imagine London without it.”
John Gapper, The Financial Times
What is the New Square Mile?
This year, we mark eight years in Somers Town at the heart of the New Square Mile. It’s a neighbourhood with a fascinating social and cultural history. Pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft lived here, as did her daughter, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. So did William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens, the latter of whom even chose The Polygon (the housing estate where he lived) as the residence for his character Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. The name St Pancras itself is a reference to centuries-old St Pancras Old Church, believed to be one of the UK’s oldest Christian sites.
But as plans for King’s Cross and Euston’s rail terminuses expanded, the face of the area changed. Land in and around Somers Town was sold off; buildings like The Polygon were pulled down to make way for cheap housing; the population soared and prosperity plummeted. Today, Somers Town remains underserved, lagging behind in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes.
When we opened our office here in 2018, it felt like an outside bet, unlike technology clusters that sprang up in Old Street (aka Silicon Roundabout) and Stratford. But like any early investment, we identified signals of potential. For one, the talent density of the area is phenomenal. With several world-leading universities in close proximity—Imperial, UCL, KCL, LSE, Central Saint Martin’s—and just Oxford and Cambridge a short train journey away, the best global talent is already flocking to the New Square Mile. Leading research organisations, like the Wellcome Trust, the Open Data Institute, and the London Bioscience Innovation Centre, give top academics plenty of reasons to stick around. The British Library, one of the world’s largest libraries, takes its place just next to St Pancras station.
Geographically speaking, the New Square Mile is one of the best connected areas in Europe. King’s Cross St Pancras connects you to Oxford and Cambridge in an hour, Paris and Brussels in two hours, Edinburgh and Amsterdam in four hours, making it a strategic centre for New Palo Alto.
In the past decade, the area has transformed. The Crick Institute opened in 2016, a testament to the New Square Mile’s spirit of collaboration as a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial, KCL, the Medical Research Council, UCL, and the Wellcome Trust. ARIA, the UK scientific research agency opened in 2023, operates out of King’s Cross. When the Coal Drops Yard redevelopment opened in 2018, the neighbourhood quickly developed a gravitational pull for the technology community. A £7.5BN Euston redevelopment is well underway, as the station is set to become the high-speed rail portal to the Midlands and the North of England.
Who’s in the neighbourhood?
The New Square Mile has been plastered across the headlines in recent months, with one Big Tech company after another planning to set up offices in King’s Cross and the surrounding neighbourhoods. Two of the UK’s most prominent seed-stage startups—Recursive Superintelligence and Ineffable Intelligence (founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver)—have opened offices here: over the past six months, the two companies have raised $500M and $1.1BN respectively, with a combined valuation close to $10BN. Away from the headlines, a number of earlier-stage startups and scaleups in the area have captured our attention.
OLIX, founded by James Dacombe, is one of the UK’s emerging AI leaders and a potential disruptor in the global chip race. They’re developing a new form of optical AI accelerator (known as Optical Tensor Processing Units or OTPUs) which are designed to make AI inference faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficient. In February, they announced a $220M Series A.
From AI infrastructure to the application layer, CoMind is ushering in an era of non-invasive neurotechnology. Also founded by James Dacombe, the company has developed an optical sensing technology that monitors key brain parameters in real-time without the need for invasive surgery. Their CoVision AI platform then transforms this sensor data into real predictive insights for care.
Model ML is demonstrating new avenues for vertical AI, in this case for financial services. The AI workspace, founded by serial entrepreneur brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander, is automating workflows for banks, asset managers, and accounting firms, across everything from investment memo creation to market analysis to due diligence reports. We led their seed round last year via LocalGlobe, and followed on in their $75M Series A later that year.
Early is another company demonstrating the strength of the New Square Mile’s life sciences industry. Their vision, to integrate healthcare into our homes, has seen them develop at-home testing tools to detect early signs of life-threatening diseases. Founder D-J Collins, originally a VP of Communications at Google, co-founded the business with Thomas Heatherwick, one of the UK’s most celebrated designers, and brings together phenomenal talent across science and design.
Eight years of Phoenix Court in the New Square Mile
When Phoenix Court moved into our Somers Town home in 2018, we made a long term commitment to helping our community realise its full potential. That mission crystallised in 2020 with the creation of Phoenix Court Works, dedicated to working with local partners and residents to build a more progressive and inclusive neighbourhood.
Technology and venture capital have long become disconnected from society, and specifically from the people who use it. By opening in Somers Town, an underserved London neighbourhood where 50% of children receive free school meals and 70% of residents receive social care, we wanted to build a new ecosystem, one where tech companies and VCs like us are good long-term neighbours and where the dividends of innovation and economic growth are shared more equitably with the neighbourhood around us.
As Saul said in a WIRED interview in 2020: “You can have physical proximity, but if you don’t have mental proximity, it doesn’t really matter. Shouldn’t innovation and technology have as widespread a social impact as possible; shouldn’t they lower the barriers for opportunity?”
This has been front of mind throughout the last decade. In 2020, we launched Phoenix Court Works, our neighbourhood foundation that works with projects in the local community across health, education, and climate. Our long-term success is shared: we dedicate 2% of our carry and 10% of our profits to the foundation. We’ve dedicated around £4M to date across grants and investments, and partnered with more than 70 different organisations, 80% of which directly impact Somers Town. Projects include funding Universal Free School Meals at three local primary schools, funding the Somers Town Law Corner (offering free legal advice to residents), and hosting quarterly Neighbourhood Labs to bring the community together around pressing and relevant topics. We’ve also focused on building new access points for members of our community to thrive in our industry: the Newton Venture Program, for instance, which is designed to nurture and propel those interested in venture capital.
As Google (whose King’s Cross office will open this summer, ten years after its scheduled completion) will attest, these things take time. But a decade is a fraction in the view of technological progress: innovation’s biggest waves, whether that’s semiconductors, the internet, or AI, play out over 50 years or more.
Likewise, we came to Somers Town to build something new, long-term, permanent, and equitable—and we’re still so early. So if you’re interested in being part of something bigger in the New Square Mile, come join us.