Dust, an AI platform founded by former OpenAI and Stripe engineers, has secured a lease at the same London building that once housed OpenAI’s first international office.
The firm, co-founded by Stanislas Polo and Gabriel Hubert, has taken up space at the Fora Building on 221 Pentonville Road in King’s Cross, City AM can reveal.
OpenAI previously occupied the building in 2024 before the $850bn tech giant signed an agreement for a permanent residence at Regent Quarter, slated to open in early 2027.
Dust was founded and headquartered in Paris in 2023 and established a physical presence in San Francisco in 2024, making the London office its third global location.
A formal entrance to the UK became a company priority in the first half of 2026, with UK fintechs Truelayer and Paddle already understood to be part of its client base.
The firm specialises in helping companies build and deploy custom AI assistants and specialised digital agents designed for use by their own internal teams.
Dust completed a $40m funding round in May 2026, led by Sequoia Capital and Abstract, providing fresh capital to accelerate its international expansion plans.
Gabriel Hubert, co-founder and chief executive of Dust, said: “The UK is one of only three countries where we have an office, alongside France and the US. That is the clearest signal I can give you about how much this market matters to us.”
Hubert added that the plan was to “scale quickly with several hires in the coming weeks”, emphasising that “our goal is to build a full-stack UK team, not just salespeople parachuting in from Paris.”
Dust will join a growing cluster of major technology firms operating in the King’s Cross area, including Databricks, Google DeepMind, Wayve, and Meta.
The surrounding one-mile radius, dubbed the Knowledge Quarter, has become a significant hub for global academic, research, and scientific organisations.
The area’s appeal to AI firms has surged notably, with companies signing nearly 40,000 sq ft of London office space within a single month this year alone.
Anthropic’s 158,000 sq ft site led that wave of signings, underlining the intense demand from AI companies for a foothold in the capital’s technology heartland.
Dust’s move signals the growing appetite among AI startups to establish credible UK operations as British fintechs seek enterprise-grade AI tools to improve internal workflows and productivity.