The pandemic has become the ultimate proving ground for Dominic Cummings’ unabashed campaign to use technology to improve government. As Covid’s gravity became clear, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser oversaw the deployment of private firms’ big data and machine learning capability at the heart of the public sector response. For example, the NHS signed a contract with Peter Thiel’s controversial analytics firm Palantir, among others, to create a “single source of truth” on key metrics like A&E capacity, ICU beds, and ventilators.
Giants like Google and Amazon Web Services too found themselves integrated themselves into the machinery of the British state, as did Faculty AI (Nos 53 and 60), which had worked for Cummings at Vote Leave during the Brexit campaign and has enjoyed a stream of government contracts ever since, landing 10 in the past two years. During the pandemic it created government dashboards to show how policy decisions were affecting businesses and monitored social media to gauge the mood of the public.
Others on our list have also been drafted by No 10 to help. Imperial College London spin-out DNANudge, founded by 59-year old Christofer Toumazou (No 73), received a £161m order from the Government for its 90-minute Covid-19 tests.
The state and the UK’s tech sector are gelling elsewhere, too, notably on identity verification and fraud detection. Vishal Marria’s Quantexa (No 28) uses vast arrays of data to spot inconsistencies and identify fraudulent activities, typically at banks. Its tech was used to help track down contacts of the London Bridge terror attackers through payments and today it claims its software can help governments “detect tax fraud, improve customs controls, [and] monitor benefits”.
Telegraph Tech 100 2020: see the full list
Similarly, Britain is developing a burgeoning biometrics scene with companies like Onfido (No 47), Veridium, and iProov (No 86) all making strides with big international brands. It seems only a matter of time before biometrics are used to access most if not all state services.
Mr Cummings has also (though not always successfully) brought tech people into the heart of government, famously posting a job ad for “data scientists and software developers … weirdos and misfits with odd skills,” and “genuine cognitive diversity” to help solve what he previously described as the “profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions”.
But it is not all one-way traffic. Pre-Covid, Cummings had long mused on his personal blog about the economic benefits of the relationship between the Federal Government and Silicon Valley in the States. So he is determined that the state help the tech sector flourish here too, and has advocated Britain back its own version of America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – or DARPA.
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This celebrated state-backed agency, founded in 1958, tested and trialled a vast number of “high risk, high reward” ideas, a few of which led to innovations that have changed the way we view the world today: GPS and Apple’s virtual assistant Siri are among those most frequently cited.
And while DARPA style interventionism and state-backing are not qualities often associated with Conservatives, Cummings is not your usual Tory. He remembers that even Silicon Valley – that icon of private enterprise – had its roots in American state defence spending. Whether it be in satellites or quantum technologies, the current British government is also interested – and invested – in moonshot technologies. If just one of them pays off, it will dramatically shape the Tech 100 list in years to come.
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