Silicon Valley may dominate the headlines, but one AI startup founder is heading in the opposite direction to the crowd. Dima Eremin, co-founder of AI notetaker startup Bluedot — software that records and transcribes video meetings and turns them into summaries — is moving the company's registered headquarters from the US to the UK, arguing that UK regulations, conversely, are making London more attractive.

The backdrop is a much-discussed exodus. According to Companies House data analysed by Rathbones, almost 6,000 owners of high-growth businesses left the UK between January 2024 and January 2026, with the tech sector leading the outflow, while only 3,182 arrived — a net loss of 2,758. Paired with all of the press coverage that founder flight from the UK has received, particularly to the US, it raises the question Eremin poses: "why would we want to be part of that incoming minority? Surely the masses have to be right, right?"

"Well, if there's one thing I've learned in my years as a founder, that's not always the case," he writes. Bluedot has been registered in the US as its main headquarters ever since the company took part in On Deck, a startup founder programme, in San Francisco back in 2021. It is now in the process of changing that for the UK.

San Francisco isn't everything

The first and most obvious reason, Eremin argues, is that despite what recent headlines may lead people to believe, the UK is still the third most important AI hub in the world after the US and China. It is also Europe's biggest producer of unicorns, creating a total of 222 over the years — more than Germany, France and Sweden combined, the next three countries on the list.

The US may still be the leading destination in terms of sheer size and funding, but Eremin challenges what he calls one of the biggest myths in startup building: that the VC flywheel route is always the best path to go down. Carta data shows that after a seed round, the median founding team collectively owns 56.2 per cent of their company's equity. At Series A, that falls to 36.1 per cent, and by the time the company reaches Series B, it is just 23 per cent. With that dilution often comes a big loss of control in determining the future and general DNA of the company.

Because Bluedot had a clear path to profitability from an early stage, it decided to remain largely bootstrapped — a decision that further weakened the desire to remain based in San Francisco. Bootstrapping might not make as many headlines, but it can absolutely build a successful business, Eremin says: Bluedot is now doing over $4m ARR coming from a base of raising just $500k. The route has precedent — Mailchimp grew for two decades without venture backing before Intuit acquired it in 2021 in a deal worth around $12bn.

Being in the US also comes with a huge cost premium, particularly in San Francisco, and talent is perhaps the best example. According to Indeed, the average salary of an AI engineer in San Francisco is just over £158,000, compared to just £83,000 in London. The cost saving is enormous while still being in one of the best locations globally when it comes to talent — and the UK is home to four of the top 10 universities in the world, exactly equal to the number found in America.

Regulation is London's unique advantage

For Bluedot, the biggest difference between the two ecosystems is policy and regulation. For an AI business handling potentially sensitive conversations — Bluedot's product is an AI notetaker — the privacy culture created by the UK's and EU's closely aligned GDPR regimes, in force in the EU since 2018 and retained in UK law after Brexit, has become the company's biggest commercial advantage. GDPR assumes data protection as a fundamental human right and is treated as such. In the US, by contrast, there is no comprehensive federal privacy statute — just a mix of sector-specific federal rules and a fast-growing patchwork of state laws such as California's CCPA — a system which businesses and consumers seem to have much less faith in.

That is why Bluedot decided from the outset to store its clients' data in Europe — and the company is winning more and more big clients that are based in America because of that. It has now decided to double down on that identity by starting to move the registered base of the company to the UK side of the Atlantic as well. The rulebook, meanwhile, is still being written: the EU's AI Act entered into force in 2024, with its obligations phasing in through 2025 and 2026, while the UK has so far taken a principles-based approach through existing regulators rather than a single AI statute.

The final factor, Eremin says, is one that is often missed amidst all the stories around millionaire flight from the UK: more than a founder, he is a dad and a family man. From schools to healthcare and everything in between, the UK has always felt to him like a more aligned environment from a lifestyle perspective than the Bay Area.

From a robust regulatory framework that supports one of the company's main USPs to being, in his view, a brilliant place to live life as well as build a company, London ticks all the right boxes for Eremin — and maybe it is not such a bad thing to be part of that incoming minority after all.

Dima Eremin is co-founder of AI startup Bluedot.