The CommonAI Compute Leadership Team

Behind CommonAI is an experienced group of mission-driven investors, operators and engineers. From their base in Silicon Fen, the heart of the UK’s technology ecosystem, they have been part of teams that have created groundbreaking products, projects and businesses.

Meet the Team

Andy Hopper

Sir Andy Hopper has pursued academic and industrial careers simultaneously. He has co-founded more than a dozen companies, three of which floated on stock markets, and was CEO of an industrial research laboratory. He was Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and was a Trustee. In 2007 he was appointed CBE and in 2021 knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Sir Andy Hopper

Founder and Director

Robert Mullins

Professor Rob Mullins is also a co-founder of lowRISC among other projects. Most famously, he co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation to inspire young people to explore computer science through programming and physical computing projects. More than 70 million Raspberry Pi’s have been sold worldwide and Raspberry Pi Holdings was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024.

Professor Robert Mullins

Founder and Director

Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison is the Group Vice Chair and Managing Partner at Anthemis. Over a 30-year career in financial services, Harry has built, managed, invested in and sold global businesses across a broad range of investment, corporate, retail, wealth, card and insurance products. An early pioneer of electronic trading, Harry has a long and successful track record of transforming financial services businesses through technological innovation.

Harry Harrison

Director

Gavin Ferris

Dr Gavin Ferris is a highly successful technologist and entrepreneur. He was Chief Investment Officer of multibillion dollar fund manager Aspect Capital and is co-founder of lowRISC, the non-profit host of OpenTitan. This $100M engineering project has now delivered its first commercial silicon into Chromebooks.

Dr Gavin Ferris

Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Rosemary Francis

Dr Rosemary Francis brings her experience as a technologist and entrepreneur who built and sold a world-class software business. Following her PhD in computer architecture from the University of Cambridge, she founded Ellexus to build system tools for semiconductor design. In 2020 Ellexus was acquired by Altair, the global leader in commercial supercomputing infrastructure, where Rosemary became Chief Scientist for HPC and Cloud.

Dr Rosemary Francis

Chief Technology Officer

Mike Halsall

Mike Halsall is a strategic consultant who has worked in real estate, technology, government and academia across the globe. He has delivered projects for the UK Home Office and Ministry of Defence, founded the Emerging Technology Radar with the UK government and worked on innovation projects with NASA and the US government’s IARPA programme. He is a founding director of the CHERI Alliance CIC, which promotes the adoption of hardware-level security.

Mike Halsall

Founder, Chief Operations Officer