Valarian Deploys ACRA across Governments, Defence Organisations and Regulated Enterprises to Ensure Data and Compute Sovereignty
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Valarian, the company building the sovereign infrastructure layer for high-consequence operations and AI-driven systems, today announced a partnership with Perplexity that brings Perplexity’s AI tool suite inside the compute boundaries of the organisations using it. Deployed through ACRA, Valarian’s sovereign execution environment, Perplexity’s answer, research and discovery capabilities run under the customer’s own policy, against the customer’s own data, on compute the customer chooses.
Perplexity has built one of the most useful ways for people and organisations to work with AI. Most of that value sits in the system around the model: the agent harness, tools, retrieval and interface that turn inference into answers, research and action. For governments, banks, defence organisations and critical infrastructure operators, consuming that experience as an externally operated service has meant leaving execution, memory and context outside their own boundary.
Two Layers, One Architecture
Perplexity provides the experience layer: the harness, tools and interaction model that help people get real value from AI. Valarian provides the sovereign execution layer: policy, runtime boundaries, workload orchestration and compute flexibility.
“The first era of enterprise AI was about access. Organisations raced to put intelligence in front of their people, and most did it by renting someone else’s environment,” said Max Buchan, CEO and Co-Founder of Valarian. “Perplexity has built the most useful AI experience in the market, and ACRA lets organisations run it inside their own boundary, deciding which intelligence executes where and under whose authority. The next era will be about owning your intelligence, and this partnership gives the institutions that need it most a way to start now.”
Through ACRA, organisations can serve and swap models, select the harnesses and tools they deploy, set the policies that govern what agents can access and why, and schedule workloads onto the right compute substrate. That substrate might be the customer’s cloud, dedicated GPUs, multiple clouds or infrastructure the organisation physically owns, and those environments can run side by side under one control layer.
“Perplexity’s enterprise customers are concentrated in industries where the data is the business: finance, science and law. For many of them, the usefulness of AI was settled a long time ago. What’s held them back is where it runs and who controls it,” said Nate Kupp, VP Engineering, Enterprise & Infrastructure at Perplexity. “Working with Valarian, we can bring Perplexity inside more of those environments, on infrastructure the customer governs. For institutions where control over execution and data isn’t optional, that changes what’s possible.”
From Renting Intelligence to Owning It
The partnership will let organisations bring Perplexity to whatever point each individual workload requires. One group of agents can call frontier models through external APIs for low-sensitivity research, while another runs inside an isolated enclave against a local model with access to confidential data, tools and secrets. ACRA keeps the same control layer across all of them, so the question each organisation answers is which intelligence should execute where, against what data, under whose authority and with what policy.
“We’re sitting on a huge amount of patient data, and our patients are of the utmost importance to us,” said Joseph Clifford, CTO at Randox. “Ensuring their data is secure is first and foremost, and we’ve seen the Valarian product as a key fit for peace of mind in that area.”
To learn more about Valarian, visit: https://www.valarian.com/.
About Valarian
Valarian is a U.K.-based sovereign infrastructure company building the control layer for high-consequence operations and AI-driven systems. Its platform enables organisations to retain control over how critical applications, AI systems and operational workloads communicate, access data and operate, while enforcing governance at the infrastructure layer. Valarian serves both enterprise and defence customers through two deployment tracks: Valarian Enterprise and Valarian Defence. Founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin, the company is headquartered in London. In July 2026, Valarian raised a $50 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing total funding to $70 million. For more information, visit www.valarian.com.
About Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI agent platform focused on accurate AI. Founded in 2022, the company’s mission is to power the world’s curiosity. Perplexity began by revolutionizing search with its AI answer engine, which now powers AI agents to learn in real time while completing tasks. Perplexity’s flagship product is Perplexity Computer, a model-agnostic orchestrator of AI agents across tools, files, chips, devices, and more. Each month, Perplexity answers more than 1.5 billion questions globally. Perplexity is available in the App Store and online at https://perplexity.com.
Contacts
Valarian Media Contact
Luca Sesti
Luca.Sesti@lcscomms.co
Perplexity Media Contact
Jesse Dwyer
jesse@perplexity.ai
