London-headquartered Foresight Williams Technology Funds has invested £1m in autonomous vehicle testing and training company dRISK.
Founded in 2014 by CEO Chess Stetson, dRISK is an AI company which promises to revolutionise autonomous vehicles’ safety by training them to avoid high risk scenarios.
dRISK counts multiple leading AV developers among its current customer base – which is growing quickly.
Its core uses networks of data to store, visualise, and reveal ‘unknown unknowns’ in complex and highly sparse data areas, allowing dRISK to build the ultimate test for self-driving cars.
The global market for AI training data alone is currently valued at $1.5bn.
FWT’s investment will accelerate the development and growth of dRISK as a central technology for AV development.
Chess Stetson, chief executive of dRISK, said: “This investment will allow dRISK to accelerate our business plan and achieve our goal of introducing the dRISK product to the majority of the AV industry and dramatically accelerate the development of safe and useable autonomous vehicles.”
Hugh Minnock, senior investment manager at Foresight, said: “Foresight Williams Technology is delighted to invest in dRISK, a hugely exciting company that will hasten the Autonomous Vehicle revolution and the decarbonised future we expect to follow.”
Matthew Burke, head of Technology Ventures at WAE, added: “dRISK’s proprietary technology has the potential to accelerate the development of automated driving control systems and overcome one of the main barriers to self-driving: the identification of edge cases. We are delighted that FWT has made this investment and we expect to leverage our knowledge of the automotive industry to increase uptake of dRISK’s technology.”
Foresight and Williams Advanced Engineering started their investment collaboration in 2016 with the launch of the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund.
Foresight has over 35 years’ experience of fundraising and investing into smaller companies in the UK, working alongside management teams to grow their businesses before exiting to deliver returns for investors.