Can the Candy Crush King's Corpora.ai put British AI on the map?

Yahoo

28-04-2025

For one of the UK's most successful serial entrepreneurs, Mel Morris, conquering the AI space and putting British AI on the map has become a singular mission. Morris was the primary investor in gaming company King – of Candy Crush fame – which was sold to Activision Blizzard in 2006 for $5.9bn.
For the last decade Morris has been working on a new venture, AI research engine Corpora.ai, biding his time until the right moment to launch. Morris is a veteran tech investor having lived through many hype cycles from selling his dating app to Match.com and an internet security company to Webroot. This experience means that he knows a thing or two about timing.
While the trajectory of AI development has been steady for the last two decades, Morris notes how OpenAI's ChatGPT took the world by surprise and changed the conversation on AI in November 2022. 'It wasn't its capabilities that took me by surprise. It was their decision to launch it at that point, that was the surprise,' says Morris, adding: 'These guys jumped the gun. They launched too soon and it wasn't quite ready.'
In the two and a half years since ChatGPT's launch, GenAI has moved from generating content from prompts to AI with dynamic reasoning abilities. These models require an increasing and indeterminate level financial and energy resource.And this is where Morris hopes to step in.
Corpora.ai is a deep research platform that Morris says can generate comprehensive reports on a broad range of topics at a cost of 6-7 cents and taking around 30-40 seconds to produce – orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than existing capabilities of Big Tech. The company is targeting model vendors, large organisations dealing with complex data, and eventually potentially offering a consumer version as a browser plug-in.
The platform is trained on publicly available data but it's the 'peripheral' data that most large model vendors exclude that makes Corpora.ai unique and gives it value above its competitors. The platform, is driven by smaller, cheaper AI models like GPT-4.1 nano instead of expensive reasoning models which Morris says gives it the ability to analyse more documents than any other competitor with hundreds - or even thousands - of citations compared to just the 200-300 that Google or OpenAI can provide.
What does Morris mean by "peripheral" data? Essentially, Corpora.ai finds valuable data hidden in plain sight that its large competitors fail to capture. Morris refers to "peripheral" or "fringe" data as documents that Corpora.ai finds at the 'edges of a subject' that can be critically important to add depth and context. This kind of data cannot easily be found by the usual search methods and often contain groundbreaking and specialised knowledge.
The output from this new data capture method is in-depth reports on any given topic from obscure medical conditions, academic research on virtually anything and business market reports, to name just a few use cases.
While investor sentiment around AI has been frenetic of late, Morris's venture is largely self-funded with Morris only answering to himself. The strength of his conviction that Corpora.ai is about to upend the AI space is demonstrated not only by his financial commitment but also by the breadth of his ambition for the startup and his willingness to get into the trenches in founder mode to evangelise about what the product can do.
Currently in Beta, Morris will officially launch in Corpora.ai in May with an event at the London AI Hub, a statement to the world that he is putting British AI on the map. Just as Google DeepMind, Britain's biggest AI success story, was sold to Google, Morris believes his exit will be another Big Tech buyout or partnership. The technology will enable model vendors to turbo charge their existing AI capacities and drive the overall development and utility of AI beyond where it currently stands.
No one is going to start a company today that is going to rival OpenAI or Google in the consumer marketplace, says Morris, explaining how Corpora.ai will focus on two aspects. 'One is to focus on the model vendors themselves, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and saying to these companies producing foundational models that with our technology you could bring to market really deep research offerings, which are highly profitable, but undercut the rest of the market so much you could achieve a dominant position,' says Morris.
Corpora.ai's strategy is finding a partnership with those companies. 'It's likely that we end up with an exclusive with one of those companies.'
Morris's other focus is on companies struggling with the vast scale of exponentially increasing amounts of data. The rapid rate of change within these large datasets makes 'AI is a bit of a curse, because it's just too costly to keep retraining, to keep fine tuning, to keep up to date' says Morris. These customers may include investment banks, hedge funds, even companies X and Meta, who are trying to understand what's happening in their user base in real-time. What is costing them a fortune today, could just be Corpora.ai's opportunity to put British AI out in front of US Big Tech.
"Can the Candy Crush King's Corpora.ai put British AI on the map?" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.
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