Dear Madam Prime Minister,

About a week ago you, or perhaps more accurately your staff, sent me a personal invite to “a reception to celebrate the UK’s tech sector”. I am of course honored to be recognized as someone worth meeting in this kind of celebration, but Madam Prime Minister, I am also incredibly conflicted.

Yes, it is true that we had our office in London for almost a year as we participated in an accelerator program, and I for many months considered the city home. Yes, we have British investors. Yes, it is true that some of our clients are also located in the UK. We did for a long while consider London as the natural place for us to establish our main headquarters.

Our company was started by a Spaniard, a Fin, a Norwegian and a Bulgarian. We have offices in Germany, Ukraine and Bulgaria. We have individual team members in France, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Spain and in the US, and our team spans even more nationalities than these. We considered us possibly cross-European if we have to pin anything down, and with our team members outside Europe even that is insufficient. We are and have been global since day one. Being a global company with a global mindset is more than a practicality; it is a core value for us, without which there would be no Iris.ai.

Along with the actual implementation of our company, the very core of what we do — democratizing science, making it accessible to everyone — is about openness, transparency and international collaboration. We fundamentally believe global sharing of ideas, skills and inventions as a must if we are to survive as a human species. Any protectionist barriers set up by politicians not only rub us the wrong way — they hurt us to the core.

Given the last two years’ experiences, it has become clear to us that the UK is not a place for us to call home. It is for moral and ethical reasons mainly, but also for practical concerns. There are too many threats imposed by a looming Brexit. We do not have enough insight into critical issues like visa status for our employees and their loved ones, startups’ continued ability to tap into both public and private frontier research funding, or the country’s general ability to retain and attract the top foreign talent needed to form a winning ecosystem. Sadly, this means that we have chosen not to establish ourselves in the country and have temporarily abandoned the idea of London as our home. We wish yours or future UK governments find it in them to embrace an agenda of true global collaboration before we can revisit that decision.

Madame Prime Minister, the efforts of Britain’s current government, including but not limited to Brexit, make us heartbroken and go against values we hold dear. As much as the honor of meeting the Prime Minister of the UK is enticing, we can not in good faith call ourselves “a celebrated part of the UKs tech sector”.

Respectfully,

Anita Schjøll Brede

on behalf of the Iris.ai and Project Aiur team — working every day for an open, transparent and fair world with equal opportunities.