A fast-growing AI technology company – registered in London but with a head office in Edinburgh since 2023 – has been acquired by global player OpenAI as part of a combined £2.96bn foundational investment.
The business opportunity represents a next generation big league consultancy offering AI engineering to enhance and accelerate business systems.
San Francisco-based OpenAI is taking on Tomoro to scale its newly announced deployment firm. The deal will see about 150 experienced deployment engineers and specialists move into The OpenAI Deployment Company. The figure for the Tomoro’s acquisition is undisclosed.
Richard Lochhead, the former Scottish Minister for Business, has recently described Tomoro, as “a European technology powerhouse helping ensure Scotland is at the forefront of the AI revolution.”
Tomoro, which had recently secured £10m in funding, was co-founded by Rishabh Sagar, Chris Spencer and Ed Broussard. Sagar is a computer science engineer with 16 years of experience in architecting, designing, developing and supporting high volume, high frequency data applications on cloud. Born in India, he worked for Accenture, Mudano, and Lloyds Banking Group. Spencer also worked at Accenture as the AI lead, and at Mudano, for over eight years latterly as head of data solutions, EY and was a banking analyst with Royal Bank of Scotland. He is a graduate of the University of Bath. They are both among the leading shareholders along with Broussard, the managing director, who was a senior enterprise fellow at University of Strathclyde, and a former board member of The Data Lab. Broussard studied business and climate change at the University of Cambridge.
Other shareholders are Albert Phelps, Ashley Garner, Chloe Kelleher, and Samuel Netherwood, and Sandipan Chanda.
The company with offices at Fountainbridge, at One Lochrin Square, also has offices in London, Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore. The company was registered by MBM Commercial, one of Scotland’s most entrepreneurial law firms.
The AI firm is launching the OpenAI Deployment Company, a new firm designed to help organisations build and deploy AI systems. The firm has been created to help extend OpenAI’s ability to embed specialist AI engineering into organisations working on complex deployments in demanding environments.
The new firm is a partnership between OpenAI and 19 other organisations led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna Capital, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp, Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners.
Investors also include leading consulting and systems integration firms, including Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey & Company.
The new firm, which OpenAI will maintain majority ownership and control over, is part of OpenAI’s continued campaign to bring its consumer market success into enterprise deployment as it competes with Anthropic’s Claude which has seen recent success in business adoption.
“Our belief hasn’t changed, but the scale of the mission has. At The Deployment Company, we’re going to build that future and amplify the change we’re already creating for our customers,” Tomoro said in a Linkedin post.
The OpenAI Deployment Company embed engineering specialists or Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), into organisations working on complex problems in demanding environments. These FDEs will work closely with business leaders, operators, and frontline teams to identify where AI can make the biggest impact, redesign organisational infrastructure and critical workflows.
The Tomoro team already work in mission-critical workflows for companies such as Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Supercell, where reliability, integration, governance, and measurable business impact matter from the start.
The launch is part of more than $4 billion of initial investment, which will be used to scale operations and acquire firms. Over the past several years, more than one million businesses have adopted OpenAI’s products and APIs.