Can Leeds Lead on Applied AI in Finance and Health?

Leeds tech founder Zandra Moore argues the city has a rare chance to lead on applied AI – if it can fix the regional gap in growth capital

Leeds has a genuine shot at being a global leader on artificial intelligence in finance and health, but only if it solves the shortage of investment reaching fast-growing firms outside London. That is the argument of Leeds tech entrepreneur Zandra Moore, who made the case at a Treasury roundtable on growth this month. Her point is a pointed one for the Leeds AI scene, that home-grown companies are increasingly taking funding from US investors because regional risk capital is so scarce, and that the city must act now to keep them here.

Why This Matters For Leeds

Access to capital largely decides whether a promising Leeds company scales up here or drifts to London or overseas, so this goes to the heart of the local economy’s future. If Leeds can turn its AI potential into companies that start, scale and stay, the payoff is high-value jobs, investment and national profile. Getting more growth capital into Leeds firms is how a promising cluster becomes a leading one.

The Leeds AI Capital Gap

Zandra Moore’s central concern is a funding gap. Most of the UK’s scale-ups are outside London, she notes, yet the supply of risk capital in the regions lags far behind, to the point where, she says, two of her AI founder peers in Leeds recently raised their Series A rounds from US funds rather than British ones. Her message to UK investors was: if they want a pipeline of high-growth tech and AI companies, they should be backing regional cities now. Chancellor John Healey, in his growth speech on 7 September, announced a £150m British Business Bank fund for scale-ups in the North and set an ambition to double the number of UK unicorns, alongside a review of how the economic potential of different places is assessed, a shift Zandra Moore argues should help emerging sectors like AI, where historical data is thin but local knowledge of the assets is strong.

“Leeds has the potential to lead globally on applied AI into financial services and health. The city needs an anchor to pull those assets and that value together.”

— Zandra Moore MBE, tech entrepreneur and CEO of Zygens

Why Leeds, and Why Now

Zandra’s case for the city rests on a distinctive set of assets. Leeds, she argues, is the only region with both the health and finance regulators co-located, sits alongside NHS England‘s headquarters and its vast store of patient records, hosts the ‘northern square mile’ of financial services, and has four universities educating well over 100,000 students a year. Her prescription is to stop spreading public money thinly and instead place bigger, focused bets. That means leveraging funds already in flight, from AI growth-zone money to the new northern scale-up fund, and directing them at the areas where Leeds AI is most likely to win. That is finance and health, built with a governance-first approach that plays to the UK’s regulatory strengths. Zandra now leads Zygens, an AI firm she founded to help financial services companies move from AI ambition to safe, putting her at the sharp end of exactly the applied-AI opportunity she is urging the city to seize.