UK Stealth Startup 22one, Building AI Tools for Police, Reaches Nearly $400 Million Valuation With Sequoia and Lux Backing

A stealth London startup that wants to sell artificial intelligence to Britain's police forces has landed one of the year's most unusual venture bets. According to the Financial Times, 22one — founded by Steven Richardson, a former detective chief superintendent at Merseyside Police — has raised funding at a valuation of nearly $400 million from Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lux Capital and Creandum. The size of the round was not disclosed, and the company has not announced a product.

Richardson's resume explains why four of the most demanding investors in technology took the meeting. He left Merseyside Police, the force covering Liverpool, in 2021, then became the UK policing lead at Amazon Web Services and later worked at Palantir, the analytics company whose law-enforcement pilots in Britain have drawn public resistance. His most concrete success is Riven, a startup he co-founded that built AI software to find and strip personal data out of police documents. NEC Software Solutions acquired Riven, and its DocDefender product is now used by almost half of UK police forces. In a pilot with Bedfordshire Police, DocDefender reached 92% accuracy and saved more than 9,500 officer and staff hours a year.

The timing tracks a policy shift. PoliceAI, a new national centre for AI in policing, launched in June with £75 million set aside over three years to fund pilot schemes in up to 10 forces, focused on processing digital evidence. Trials run through 2026-27, with a full rollout expected in 2027. England and Wales have 43 territorial police forces, and the government wants AI adoption to accelerate across all of them.

For Sequoia, the bet rhymes with a playbook it has run before. The firm led Peregrine Technologies' $190 million round at a $2.5 billion valuation in March 2025; by June, Peregrine had raised another $250 million at a $6.8 billion valuation. Lux Capital invested early in Anduril, General Catalyst led defence AI unicorn Helsing's 2024 Series C, and Creandum backed Lovable before the vibe-coding company reached a $13.3 billion valuation.

What makes 22one unusual is the sequence: a near-unicorn valuation before a shipped product. The company is incorporated in the UK and therefore counts as homegrown for procurement purposes, but its funding is American and Swedish, with no British investors named — a pattern that will not go unnoticed as Whitehall weighs how much of its policing data infrastructure should sit with foreign-backed vendors.

The open question is procurement trust. Police forces cannot buy on hype, and Riven earned its contracts through careful pilots and published accuracy data. A $400 million valuation built on a founder's track record rather than a product line is a test of whether the AI funding wave has finally reached the last big untapped vertical in the public sector — and of whether British forces will trust an unproven vendor with the documents at the center of criminal justice.