Whitespace

About Whitespace

Whitespace, a Belfast-based firm founded in 2015 by Paul Jenkinson and Andrew McCartney, has established itself as a key provider of sovereign AI solutions tailored for high-assurance sectors. Initially a small engineering team creating bespoke AI for defence and enterprise clients, the company has since matured, focusing on critical and regulated industries. This strategic direction culminated in a significant milestone in November 2025, when Whitespace secured £10 million in a Series A funding round led by Beach Equity and White Cloud, bringing its total raised capital to $13 million. This infusion of capital is earmarked for scaling its operations to meet the increasing demand from defence, national security, and other regulated markets.

The company's core offering is Collective, an AI operating system engineered for security-first environments. The platform enables organizations to build, deploy, and govern AI applications across a variety of settings, including cloud, on-premise, at the edge, and even in fully air-gapped systems where security and data control are paramount. Collective is designed as a modular system with an intuitive app-like dashboard, giving users access to a suite of tools for tasks like chat, insights generation, and decision support. This architecture allows it to function as a secure, multimodal AI assistant capable of processing text, images, and video in restricted environments. The business model appears to be SaaS-based, with revenue generated through subscriptions and direct sales to government and enterprise clients.

Whitespace's credibility in the defence sector is underscored by its status as one of only four small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to be awarded an enterprise agreement by the UK's Ministry of Defence, a framework designed to streamline procurement with trusted technology partners. The company's focus on 'sovereign AI' emphasizes building technology that a nation can trust and control within its most critical systems, a key differentiator in the high-stakes markets it serves. CEO Paul Jenkinson has articulated this mission, stating, “Sovereignty isn't a slogan; it's an infrastructure choice.”