Growth platform Tech Nation has revealed the 32 artificial intelligence companies who have been accepted into Applied AI 3.0 – the third iteration of the Applied AI programme.
The six-month government-backed Applied AI programme was created to support and accelerate the UK’s highest-potential AI scaleups who are applying AI in practical areas to create real-world impact.
This year’s successful companies were assessed by over 35 judges across key industries, including government, investors and senior representatives from companies such as Microsoft, Google and PwC, including Sana Khareghani, Head of UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence, Azeem Azhar, Creator of Exponential View, and Jem Davies, VP Fellow and GM of Machine Learning Group at Arm.
The programme forms part of the Government’s AI Sector Deal, announced in 2019 to realise the social and economic benefits of AI and harness its potential to transform people’s lives for the better.
AI is already a strategic strength to the UK economy, with 1,344 AI companies and a number of well-known and established AI unicorns, including Darktrace, Benevolent AI and Graphcore.
New data from Tech Nation and Dealroom reveals AI is one of the UK’s fastest-growing tech sectors, with VC Investment in AI for the year 2021 (Jan-Aug) at $3.3bn, already surpassing the $3bn invested in all of 2020.
Nearly a third (10 out of 32) of the companies are using AI to transform the healthcare sector. Other companies are applying AI to tackle real social and environmental problems including climate change, and the lack of female representation in medical research.
This year’s growth programme is joined by 15 companies based outside of London (47% of the cohort), with the highest representation from the South East and East of England, closely followed by the North West.
This year’s successful applicants will gain access to 11 compact insight sessions over 6 months delivered by later-stage founders, all focused on key scaling challenges, as well as 6 coaching sessions (intimate Founder Circles with a startup coach to develop leadership skills and peer connections), and regular networking opportunities (with investors, VCs, corporates and peers).
Sam Beni, Applied AI Programme Lead, said: “Following the turbulence of 2020 with the global pandemic, the number of Applied AI scaleups focussing on transforming the world of healthcare is a beacon of hope for the coming years, and the breadth of industries that these AI scaleups are disrupting is testament to AI’s power to shape the world we live in.”
Applied AI 3.0 cohort
Akrivia Health – Oxford – Healthtech
Akrivia Health is a data-driven discovery company, specialising in real-world data on mental health and dementia disorders. Powered through artificial intelligence and robust governance, the company brings together engineers, researchers, clinicians, patients and industry to build massive multi-dimensional datasets and powerful analytic tools to accelerate the development of new treatments and service improvements in mental health and dementia.
AINOSTICS – Manchester – Healthtech
AINOSTICS is an award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) enabled analytics and diagnostics company, commercialising over two decades of world-leading research into the diagnosis of various neurological conditions, such as dementia, multiple sclerosis (MS), stroke, brain tumours, traumatic brain injury (TBI) by the company’s founding team and globally renowned scientific advisors. The solutions represent breakthroughs that can provide affordable, automated, extensible and personalised healthcare platforms for assisting the clinical diagnosis of various hard-to-diagnose tissue modifying neuropathologies. AINOSTICS aims to become the global leader in the provision of solutions for remote monitoring and clinical assessment in such conditions.
AI VIVO – Cambridge – Healthtech
AI VIVO combines systems biology and machine learning/AI, to create an entirely new drug discovery paradigm. By looking beyond single molecular targets, AI VIVO considers the whole cell and provides a new platform to understand cellular dynamical behaviour. The AI VIVO proprietary prediction engine is optimised to predict interventions that change cellular behaviour from dysfunctional behaviours (disease) towards normal behaviours (healthy) significantly faster, cheaper and more accurately.
Analytics Engines – Belfast – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Analytics Engines enables organisations to easily and quickly adopt data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence as a core part of their business and accelerate conversion of data into valuable business insights and outcomes. To better enable this, the company has developed an innovative insight and discovery platform MINERVA which seeks to solve a key challenge of understanding complex interrelationships between datasets and surfacing previously unseen (or obfuscated) connections within this data. MINERVA enables users to enhance, query, search and explore their data to find hidden patterns and relationships between individuals, organisations, places and documents to better understand risk, find opportunities, or locate anomalies.
askporter – St Albans – Proptech
Managing places and real assets is time-consuming, high-risk and human resource intensive. askporter was founded out of the belief that human time is precious. The askporter platform enables people to interact with their real-world environment effortlessly by helping organisations manage their customers, places and real assets autonomously with AI.
Conigital – Birmingham – Transport tech
Conigital is a driverless vehicle & intelligent mobility-as -a-service company offering on-demand driven and (retrofitted) driverless vehicles. Conigital offers a turnkey, automated and optimised integration of CAVs into a local transport system. Utilising AI and machine learning techniques, Conigital’s integrated solution improves asset management, customer experience and operational efficiency. This means increased safety, higher efficiency and a reduction in wasted time and a significant step towards on-demand MaaS (Mobility as a Service) and FaaS (Freight as a Service) solutions.
Deep Planet – Didcot – Agritech & foodtech
Deep Planet, a startup from Oxford University, helps winemakers and growers build resiliency against the effects of climate change. Deep Planet’s VineSignal is a SaaS-based AI platform using satellite imagery and IoT sensor data, to help growers decide where and when to harvest. Deep Planet helps to monitor maturity and predict optimal harvest dates and identify areas of quality to meet the needs of higher value wines. Features include vineyard health monitoring, highly accurate hands-off weekly yield prediction, enhanced irrigation capability, early disease detection, and soil carbon monitoring.
Dragonfly AI – London – Adtech & Marketing
Dragonfly AI is a predictive analytics platform designed to help creative, marketing and insights teams improve the effectiveness of content and experiences across any channel. Dragonfly AI uses cutting-edge neuroscience to accurately and instantly show what grabs audiences’ attention first across any content. Using an algorithm based on a decade of scientific research, Dragonfly AI simulates how attention works in the brain to show instantly what an audience sees first.
dRISK.ai – London – Transport tech
For autonomous vehicles (AVs) to become a commercial reality, AV developers are starting to realize that they must learn to handle huge numbers of edge cases — the countless high-risk scenarios which are individually unlikely, but together make up the bulk of the risk. dRISK is solving this problem with a full-stack technology suite for training and testing AVs on the most diverse collection of edge cases. This product, the first true driver’s test for self-driving cars, is funded by a major grant from the UK’s Department of Transport.
Dyad – London – Healthtech
Dyad is building an AI-powered knowledge graph that enhances and accelerates the adoption of value-based care. Upon this foundation, they develop applications that help healthcare providers optimise their workflows and maximise income under pay-for-performance schemes, while payers are able to optimise risk adjustment, revenue cycle management, master member indexing, and more.
eebz – Windsor – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Salesforce doesn’t work for retail sales. eebz is a data-first approach to help brands increase their sales at retail. eebz sources data from retailers’ websites and API’s and then uses AI to make recommendations to the teams who sell to these retailers.
Etiq AI – London – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Etiq is developing a software solution that enables businesses to identify and mitigate biases, which are inherent within all automated decision-making systems. Founded in 2019 (London, UK), Etiq’s product comprises algorithms that assess how robust the models employed by their business clients are, based on a deep understanding of the factors which constitute best practice definitions of fairness and accuracy in AI solutions. Etiq’s analysis, testing and modelling process is then able to provide uniquely innovative solutions to mitigate the biases identified, resulting in greater market opportunities, and decreased compliance and reputational risk for their clients.
Future Anthem – London – Gaming / Immersive
Future Anthem is the market leader in Game Data Science. The company uses machine learning to provide actionable intelligence to help their customers grow responsibly with measurable improvements that enhance the player experience for everyone. Future Anthem’s AI solutions personalise and protect the player experience in real-time. The company also helps operators and games studios apply data to product design decisions and optimise performance. Future Anthem calls this Game Data Science.
Gendius – Alderley Edge – Healthtech
Gendius’ mission is to be the World’s leading solution provider at preventing and managing the complications of Chronic Disease through the use of AI. Gendius has developed algorithms from 10 year longitudinal data sets that enable earlier identification of an individual’s risk of developing complications and earlier intervention by the healthcare team and patient. The team at Gendius have developed an award winning platform, Intellin(R), to deliver algorithms directly to the healthcare team and patient.
Headlight AI – London – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Headlight AI’s vision is to be the leading company globally in the development and deployment of smart digitalisation and assessment tools for critical infrastructure across Utilities, Transport, and Construction. Headlight AI’s mission is to help organisations digitise and assess their critical infrastructure, across the most extreme environments, in all weather conditions, any time of day, above and below ground. The company has started with underground environments, and integrated sensors and electronics with its proprietary software to enable robots to operate where it is unsafe or challenging for humans, thereby improving health and safety during data collection, and providing a scalable solution with enhanced survey information for infrastructure inspection and maintenance. This can ensure projects run on time, on budget, all whilst reducing carbon emissions.
Humanloop – London – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Humanloop is a low-code platform to rapidly build state-of-the art natural language AI models and immediately deploy them. Using Humanloop, software teams can do in hours what previously took weeks and save tens of thousands in annotations costs and data science expertise.
iamYiam – London – Healthtech
iamYiam is an award-winning, personalised digital platform focused on preventing physical and mental health problems. Given a global healthcare cost of $8 trillion, of which $6.1 trillion is purely linked to preventable or manageable diseases, the company aims to empower people to manage or prevent diseases and mental illnesses such as stress, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, back-pain, hypertension and depression. Combining big health data, artificial intelligence and genetic and academic research covering more than 2.5 million clinical trial subjects, iamYiam delivers a personalised, performance-focused health plan facilitated by sydTM, a personalised AI companion. Alongside this, the iamYiam LifeQuality Index measures impact in preventive health using data insights to deliver a personalised-health recommender-engine and population-insight health dashboard for outcomes-based health planning.
KYMIRA – Reading – Healthtech
KYMIRA is an innovator in the smart wearable textiles industry. It combines AI with cutting-edge electronic-textiles – both of which are developed internally – to provide game-changing healthcare solutions. KYMIRA’s garments aim to improve patient outcomes and reduce the burden on healthcare providers.
LiberEat – Aberdeen – Agritech and Foodtech
LiberEat makes food safer and easier for people with dietary restrictions including veganism, vegetarianism, allergies & intolerances. Its unique AI-based technology can identify mistakes in food data from suppliers and its allergen safety technology also significantly outperforms methods used by even the largest food businesses to check the accuracy of allergen information in food labels, menus and supplier data. The consumer app helps users by providing bespoke menus, supermarket grocery options, and recipes, with options filtered by their dietary requirements and their family’s requirements. The app also helps businesses such as restaurant chains, supermarkets and food producers by making them more accessible to a large rapidly growing customer group and providing unique, industry leading analytics and insights.
Micrographia Bio – London – Healthtech
Micrographia Bio is a next-generation life sciences business which applies machine learning to microscopy to lower barriers to drug discovery. Micrographia turns drug discovery on its head; instead of asking the question ‘which of these millions of molecules cures this specific disease?’ it asks the question: ‘for this molecule, which disease is it best suited to cure?’
OilX – London – Entech
OilX counts the world’s oil, one barrel at a time with one bold target: zero missing barrels. OilX enables traders and analysts to gain intelligence that is facts-based and helps them to draw conclusions faster via intuitive and accurate real-time oil data analytics and market intelligence reports that facilitate confident decision-making. With OilX, traders and analysts get a comprehensive view of the global oil markets enabling them to spend more time trading rather than analysing, and make better, faster, data-driven decisions as a result.
Optimal – London – Agritech & foodtech
Modern greenhouses are critical to the future of agriculture but the industry cannot scale to meet demand due to the reliance on highly-skilled growers. Optimal’s autonomous growing system overcomes this final barrier to scale, enabling the rapid global transition towards greenhouse agriculture. By 2030, Optimal will be a technology-enabled operator of 60 greenhouses with revenue of $3bn.
PharmEnable – Cambridge – Healthtech
PharmEnable is an AI drug discovery company unlocking challenging targets by mapping unexplored chemical space. It reproduces the specificity of biologics in the powerful form of a small molecule. The company is passionate about making a difference to patients through developing life-changing drugs.
Robin AI – London – Lawtech
Robin AI is a legal tech company which uses machine learning and other software to automatically review and amend legal contracts. A ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach uses a combination of AI and expert human reviewers to ensure that documents are processed with the quality of a lawyer but faster and at a fraction of the cost. The company has focused on the private equity and M&A industry where the processing of high-volume and routine but important documents is a real pain point in the deal-making process.
Sparkbox – Southampton – Retail tech
Sparkbox is a cloud application that helps retailers sell more inventory, more profitably by optimising their pricing and merchandising decisions. It pairs machine learning and predictive analytics with a simple planning application to help busy retail teams leverage their data, understand the impact of their decisions, and maximise the value of their inventory. Sparkbox is relevant for ecommerce and physical retail – in a most recent trial the company onboarded a £800m retailer in 34 days and improved their sale profit by more than 50%.
TOffeeAM – London – Advanced manufacturing
TOffeeAM software optimises engineering component designs to achieve the highest possible performance. The company specialises in fluid structure topology optimisation, with applications in heat exchanges, robust optimisation and valves. The complex designs produced can be manufactured using additive manufacturing.
TurinTech – London – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
TurinTech is a leader in evolutionary AI optimisation. Its vision is to empower businesses to scale AI efficiently by automating the whole data science lifecycle with multi-objective optimisation. It aims to drive enterprise AI transformation with minimum human effort, at large scale, high speed and low cost.
Versed AI – Cambridge – Data Analytics & Business Intelligence
Versed AI uses natural language processing to map companies’ multi-tiered supply chains by processing vast quantities of publicly available text documents. Understanding extended supply chains is important for managing disruption risk, reputational risk, and compliance risk such as the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Waymark Tech – London – Fintech
Waymark Tech develops and supplies regulatory intelligence solutions for organisations operating in highly regulated industries. The cost of complying with regulations continues to increase and represents a growing burden on businesses; compliance practitioners identify their biggest challenge to be managing and coping with regulatory change. The platform is an award-winning, natural language processing solution that helps compliance teams drastically reduce their current manual processes, improve oversight and provide transparency.
WILD.AI – London – Femtech
Biologically, women are not the same as men – but the medical research world fails to accommodate this. 80% of the medical research is still done exclusively on male mice. WILD.AI‘s extensive research on women’s health is translated into an app, serving women from menstruation to menopause.
Hyper Group (registered as Method Analytics Ltd) – Leeds – Retail tech
Hyper uses AI and data science to help retailers and brands understand the deep relationships between their customers and products, and enables them to use this insight to make more profitable, customer-led decisions about product range, pricing and personalisation. This is done via a SaaS platform which combines AI & data science, business intelligence and decision intelligence. Hyper gives non-technical people the ability to uncover powerful insights and make better decisions via a highly intuitive, visual user interface, reducing the need to recruit expensive and hard-to-find data scientists.
e-Pharmacy – Norwich – Healthtech
The e-Pharmacy API platform works with third-party companies to offer more people access to prescription medication and on-demand pharmacist support. A patient simply needs to go on a website, choose the medication they need, fill in a simple health questionnaire and pay for their item. The service empowers patients to take control of their health in a safe and regulated way and, ultimately, reduce the burden of illness on the wider healthcare system.
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