Expanse, an AI infrastructure company founded by four University of Edinburgh graduates, has raised $5.3 million in seed funding to expand its engineering team and bring its computing software to more organisations.
The round, announced on 16 September, was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from PXN Ventures and angel investors including former DeepMind researchers and leaders from AI infrastructure teams.
The team is now based in San Francisco after joining startup accelerator Y Combinator earlier this year, according to Edinburgh Innovations, the university’s commercialisation service.
Expanse’s software predicts the computing resources a job will need before it runs. The company says it uses the job’s code, records of similar runs and available hardware to help organisations avoid reserving capacity they will not use or allocating too little for a job to finish.
Co-founder and chief executive Ismaeel Bashir developed a resource-prediction system while studying for his master’s degree at the university’s EPCC computing centre. He founded Expanse with fellow graduates Nikodem Bieniek, Eren Mendi and Yafet Melake.
In the company’s funding announcement, Bashir wrote: “The round goes into engineers, and into getting Expanse onto more clusters across AI labs, quant finance, life sciences and research computing.”
The company says its software operates within customers’ own computing environments, with their code and data remaining there.
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Expanse was founded in October 2025, when two of its founders were still students. Edinburgh Innovations supported its formation and provided its first finance through the Launch Point competition in September that year.
The business aims to help organisations make greater use of existing computing hardware rather than adding capacity.
