SenSat, the UK tech company that simulates reality, has raised £3.31m in seed funding.
The round was supported by notable investors including Force Over Mass, Round Hill Venture Partners and Zag, which is the venture arm of global creative agency BBH.
The investment will be used to develop SenSat’s technology, which turns complex data into a real-time simulated reality that helps computers solve real world problems.
The company, which turned a profit within its first quarter of trading, is also looking to invest in its San Francisco office as it continues on its trajectory to achieve 1,300 per cent year-on-year growth.
The company’s cloud-based tech allows companies operating in physical domains, such as infrastructure construction, to make more informed decisions based on multiple variables at large scale and complexity.
SenSat calls this ‘Visual Intelligence’, a subset of artificial intelligence focussed on teaching computers how to understand and interact with the real world.
Since launch SenSat’s simulated reality platform, Mapp®, has supported over £3.5bn of civil infrastructure projects for clients such as National Grid and Highways England.
The platform gives a deeper understanding of site workings in an easy-to-use, accessible interface, helping companies track key project variables such as safety and progress.
Aggregating digital data, Mapp® has successfully recreated the entirety of High Speed Rail 2 (HS2), using methods that are 75 times more efficient than previously possible.
The company already has research streams looking at applications for 5G. For example, Swiss company U-Blox is using SenSat’s Cambridge City simulated reality to plan cellular mast locations.
Autonomous vehicles can also use the platform to run millions of hours of driverless simulation in a real-world environment and using it with AR and VR allows users to quickly create content based on exact replicas of real world environments.
“We believe that the ability for computers to understand and interact with the real world is the next major phase in technology,” said James Dean, CEO of SenSat.
“It will enhance the human experience and change how we understand the real world, helping us to make better decisions.
SenSat CTO Alvin Chua said: “The core technologies we’re building enable many of the emerging technologies of tomorrow.
“By creating an operating system that allows users to apply our base technology into solving their niche needs, we create the ability for Mapp® to positively impact any industry that makes critical decisions based upon physical and environmental factors.”