Follow these most amazing and promising artificial intelligence startups. These companies are working with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.
It's official, 2016 has been the year of the AI startup acquisition. Tech giants Apple, Intel, Twitter and Microsoft have all spent large sums to bring artificial intelligence startups, and their expertise, inhouse.
Four of the biggest AI startup acquisitions of the last five years have come from the UK, starting with Google's purchase of Deep Mind in 2014 for a reported £400 million. Since then Apple has purchased Cambridge-based natural language processing specialists VocalIQ, Microsoft bought the machine learning powered keyboard SwiftKey in February and Twitter acquired Entrepreneur First alumni Magic Pony in June.
Here are some of the most interesting startups working in the area of artificial intelligence in the UK today, whether that is machine learning, deep learning, neural nets or computer vision. Could the next Deep Mind be lurking in there?
1. Darktrace
The established security startup from Cambridge, Darktrace, uses machine learning algorithms to spot patterns and catch cyber criminals before they can hit. Cyber threats are created at a rate too fast for security companies to keep up to date, so smart use of machine learning allows Darktrace to, in theory, stay ahead of the criminals.
Darktrace uses AI techniques to learn what is normal within a company's network so that it can quickly identify anomalies. According to its website: "This allows it to detect cyber attacks of a nature that may not have been observed before, the unknown unknowns."
Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan told Techworld in 2014: “People are finally accepting that compromises are happening, regardless of how much perimeter security and malware detection software they’ve put in."
Darktrace raised a massive $65 million investment round led by investment firm KKR in July.
2. BenevolentAI
BenevolentAI is a UK startup focused on bringing the power of AI and machine learning to the genomics space.
The idea is to expedite the traditional research process by ingesting huge amounts of data and literature using proprietary algorithms and NVIDIA’s DGX-1 deep learning supercomputer. BenevolentAI then builds tools on top to match the workflow of drug discovery scientists so that they can easily mine and interrogate the data, ideally reducing the time to market for important drugs.
BenevolentAI is one of the best funded AI startups in the UK, bringing in a massive Series A round of £72 million in a single undisclosed round.
3. Onfido
London startup Onfido is doing similar work to Darktrace but with identity and background checks.
Founded by a trio of Oxford graduates, the platform plugs into various publicly available databases to give employers quick identity verification and background checks for things like driving and criminal records.
In their own words, Onfido's "intelligent software revolutionises the archaic background checking industry through automated data aggregation and verification". The company is hiring machine learning and computer vision engineers to build on the smart platform.
Onfido raised a strong Series B funding round of $25 million (£19 million) in April, led by Idinvest Partners.
4. Echobox
Echobox is building AI for the publishing industry, and claims to have developed "the world's first artificial intelligence that understands the meaning of content". Founder Antoine Amann is a Cambridge graduate who worked in publishing with theFinancial Times and developed Echobox while at Entrepreneur First in 2013.
Amman wrote in a blog post that Echobox has "developed an AI platform that takes a large quantity of variables into account and analyses them in real time to determine optimum post performance".
Echobox social is a predictive tool which optimises content for social media, which the startup claims to double referrals from Facebook and Twitter, without having to do your own analytics, A/B testing or content curation. Basically: RIP social media editors. It has worked with the likes of Vice and The Telegraph in the UK media.
Echobox raised $3.4 million Series A funding round in July led by Mangrove Capital Partners.
5. Ravelin
Ravelin is the brain child of former Hailo employees who saw that existing anti-fraud technology wasn't fit for the on-demand market. Its machine-learning algorithms are integrated with customer data to give a contextual basis for detecting potentially fraudulent transactions.
COO Nick Lally told Techworld that where rival payment gateways like Stripe analyse transactions, "we analyse customers". Lally says there is no cold start problem with its machine learning models, "when they integrate against our APIs we ask them to backfill data and chargebacks to inspect that and train a model on those. So from day one they get great results", he said.
Ravelin launched commercially nine months, with early customers including Deliveroo and EasyTaxi. It raised £3 million in October, led by Playfair Capital and included Amadeus Capital and Passion Capital.
6. Stepsize
Stepsize is a startup working on AI to help software developers.
Their first product, Stepsize Layer, is a desktop application for developers that automatically adds context to code bases, so developers have a better view of who wrote a piece of code, when, and why. They do this by pulling together commits, code reviews and user stories to create a timeline for that code. It integrates with Slack so developers can contact the author and ask questions about the code.
Three of the co-founders are UCL mathematics graduates, with Matthieu Louis and Nick Omeyer specialising in machine learning for their masters. The team are currently working on pooling data to build and train machine learning algorithms to help software developers.
Stepsize is part of the Virgin Media Accelerator Programme.
7. Phrasee
London-based startup Phrasee is aiming its artificial intelligence systems at the marketing sector, using natural language processing techniques to optimise digital marketing messages.
As its website states: "Out of trillions of ways to write something, what are the odds your gut instinct gets it right? The answer: next to none." Phrasee integrates with major email service providers and will optimises subject lines and copy to increase open rates. The startup also offers software which prompts marketers to make better calls to action based on the data.
The AI engine simulates millions of permutations of copy and makes a prediction based on historic results about what will perform best. This is then fed back into the engine so that it gets better the more you use it.
Phrasee raised £1 million in seed funding led by communications business Next 15, which owns a range of marketing agencies.
8. Grip
Grip is the London based startup that is using AI to make networking at events more productive. The startup, formerly known as Networkr, was rebranded in April because, as CEO Tim Groot told Techworld: "People don't like networking, so we wanted a name open to interpretation."
Grip collects data from social accounts (LinkedIn, Twitter) and registration data to act as a smart matchmaking service - using a swipe interface - for corporate event goers. Think 'Tinder for networking'. Grip will then deliver a report back to the event organiser to identify how successful the event has been for every user or social segment.
Groot told Techworld that the average Grip user made 300 swipes during the Cannes Lions advertising festival this year. When it comes to the AI, Groot says hiring talent to join their engineers in Copenhagen wasn't difficult and that "matching people in professional setting is an exciting problem to be thinking about" for their engineers.
Grip merged with fellow professional networking startup Intros.at in 2015 and is seeking a funding round later this year. Groot says the company is making revenue from events already, and is working with the likes of Reed Exhibitions and Cannes Lions.
9. Seldon
Seldon is an AI startup focusing on bringing machine learning capabilities into the enterprise. Seldon creates tools that help data scientists derive value from big data within an organisation quicker, namely processing data and creating algorithms and models.
The platform has two main functions: recommendations and predictions. For recommendations the open source platform captures and logs user actions via an API delivers recommendations based on your models. For predictions Seldon claims it can predict what products a customer is likely to buy so that sales teams can build supervised, learning-based predictive models and pipelines.
Seldon.io already works with YouGov, Lastminute.com and RatedPeople.com. and is based out of the Barclays incubator in London. It has raised two undisclosed funding rounds from Techstars.
10. Tractable
Based in south London, Tractable is an enterprise deep learning consultancy focused on automating tasks that were previously considered too expert for an AI to perform.
The website reads: "Our AI technology combines image recognition and text understanding to interpret unstructured and specialist data, as domain experts do. If your business relies on expert visual analysis or language understanding, our AI can bring drastic performance gains."
Tractable offers bespoke deep learning solutions depending on its clients requirements, and has built an automated audit claims product for the insurance industry. The team is led by Alex Dalyac, a computer science postgraduate from Imperial College London and Razvan Ranca, a computer science postgrad from Cambridge University.
Tractable raised $1.9 million (£1.4 million) in June last year, led by Zetta Venture Partners.
11. re:infer
re:infer is currently in private beta, working with companies like ecommerce startup Farfetch. The technology uses deep neural networks in its AI bots that can process and respond to customer queries in natural language. The re:infer platform also pulls all forms of user feedback - email, surveys, social media - into one place and applies AI to make sense of the data. Re:infer is also looking into ways to allow customers to use these chatbots to do their shopping.
The founders met while studying in the AI research group at UCL, the same university that the Deep Mind founder Demis Hassabis got his PhD from.
re:infer received £65,000 in funding from the Seedcamp incubator it is currently based out of the Seedcamp incubator in London.
12. Cleo
The intelligent assistant Cleo's main function is to help you be smarter with your money. It has been developed by computer science graduates Barney Hussey-Yeo and Aleksandra Wozniak, who met as members of Entrepreneur First's fifth cohort.
Cleo works via a messaging platform which, once you give it permission to your account information, can answer questions about your finances. Using deep learning techniques allows Cleo to learn and adapt to your habits and preferences.
As the website states: "Imagine if you had your own team of McKinsey consultants, Goldman Sachs associates and hedge fund analysts whose sole job is to advise you on your money."
13. Brolly
This UK insurtech startup that is in the current Entrepreneur First cohort is building an AI enable insurance adviser. The app says it will be able to inform you if you are under or over insured, if you have duplicate or missing cover and can help you find better cover. You sign up once and then getting new cover only takes one tap.
Brolly also acts as a mobile wallet for all of your insurance products, including documents, to be managed in one place. Brolly is currently in beta and says it will launch on iOS and Android in 2016.
14. StatusToday
Another Entrepreneur First alumni, StatusToday collects the metadata created whenever someone within an organisation takes an action on their computer. It then applies machine learning to spot user behaviour patterns and flag anomalies, which could mean a breach has occurred.
StatusToday has raised two undisclosed funding rounds from Entrepreneur First and Force Over Mass Capital to date.
