Nick Clegg joins VC firm HIRO Capital to target spatial AI opportunities

By Paul ‌Sandle

LONDON, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Nick Clegg, the former president of global ‍affairs at ‌Meta and deputy prime minister of Britain, has joined founder-led venture ⁠capital firm HIRO Capital to invest ‌in spatial AI innovation in Europe, the firm said on Wednesday.

Clegg will join HIRO's general partners Luke Alvarez, Cherry Freeman and British computer games legend Ian ⁠Livingstone in the new HIRO III fund, which is understood to have more than 500 ​million euros ($582 million) to deploy.

Yann LeCun, who recently announced ‌he was standing down as ⁠Meta's chief AI scientist, will join HIRO's advisory board, it said.

Clegg, who left Meta in January, said there was a shared belief in ​the HIRO team that the next stage of technology would be focused on spatial, immersive computing platforms, which underpin technologies like robotics, augmented reality and self-driving cars.

"There's a great deal of expertise, deep laboratory ​and academic ‍research in Europe, which ​can and will become increasingly relevant," he said in an interview on Wednesday.

Pessimism about Europe's prospects versus the U.S. or China was overdone, he said, pointing to a growing pipeline of opportunities.

"We're still an affluent continent of 500 million-plus people with some of the best researchers and labs ⁠in the world, (and) we actually have an increasingly vibrant tech startup scene," he said.

He said the team ​had already identified opportunities in robotics, sports and gaming, and defence, as well as spatial computing technologies such as orientation, navigation and autonomy.

The fund will deploy between 5 million euros and 50 ‌million euros in investments, targeting a gap for scale-up capital in Europe, the firm said.

($1 = 0.8589 euros)

(Reporting by Paul Sandle. Editing by Mark Potter)