The University of Liverpool has formed a new spin out company - Robotiz3d Ltd – to take forward new technology that has the potential to radically transform road maintenance.  Robotiz3d Ltd is a joint venture spin out company established in partnership with A2e Ltd and will receive investment from the University’s Enterprise Investment Fund, alongside private equity investment from a2e Ltd.

Personify XP, the world’s first anonymous digital analytics and AI personalisation platform, has closed a £550,000 pre-seed round. Investors include Founders Factory, Touker Suleyman and other high-profile angels. As part of Founders Factory’s investment, its operations team across a number of core business functions are providing hands-on support to support the growth of Personify XP.

Pimloc, the visual privacy and security company, has closed £1.4M in new financing in a seed funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners with participation from Speedinvest and existing shareholders.

Founded in 2016, Pimloc specialises in deep learning systems for security video and diverse image collections. Pimloc’s technology powers products that enable private businesses and public organisations to protect sensitive or personal visual data, to maintain safe online environments and to manage video security footage.

Tech Nation, the growth platform for tech companies and leaders, announces the 32 companies that have been selected to join the Applied AI Growth programme and reveals new data that shows the UK leads Europe for AI investment. 

AI chatbot specialists, We Build Bots, has set its sights on global growth with the announcement that international technology evangelist, Patrick Hosch, has been appointed as chief commercial officer.

Humley, a company which develops conversational assistants capable of manning helpdesks and answering technical enquiries, has raised £700,000 to help scale up its operationssecured the investment from the MEIF Proof of Concept & Early Stage Fund, which is managed by Mercia and part of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF), Mercia’s own EIS funds and a private investor.

The funding, which follows an earlier round by private investors, brings the total raised by Humley to £1.4m and will allow the Northampton-based company to grow its customer base and revenue ahead of a planned Series A funding round next year.

Spoon Guru, the London-based AI powered food search and discovery technology start-up, has has secured a Series A funding round with W23, the Venture Capital arm of Australia’s largest retailer, Woolworths Group. The multi-million dollar investment will be used to expand Spoon Guru’s footprint with retailers across APAC, North America and Europe, at a time when governments are putting a greater focus on the importance of food and health to boost national health. 

ThoughtRiver, the market leader in automated contract review and pre-screening, has announced $10M (£7.5M) in Series A funding. The round is led by Octopus Ventures, a leading European venture capital firm which invests in technology innovation leaders.   The investment comes after ThoughtRiver achieved record growth over the past twelve months. It recently signed contracts with some of the world’s leading companies, including giants such as G4S, Singtel, and DB Schenker. 

Bristol-based tech startup Geollect is one of 10 companies chosen to take part in a special mentoring programme being run by the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency.  The aim of the scheme is to develop creative products based on data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques that have the potential to help communities and businesses. 

Turquoise, the London-based merchant bank specialising in energy, environment and efficiency, has announced its latest investment through Low Carbon Innovation Fund 2 (LCIF2) in Spark EV Technology.  The investment, worth £160,000, is part of an ongoing £530,000 funding round for Spark EV Technology. This will support the company’s automotive market growth, assist business development efforts into China and expand its reach to European and North American customers. Harnessing live data and machine learning, Spark’s AI-based software produces highly accurate, personalised range predictions for electric vehicles. 

Humanloop, a game changing UCL spinout, has attracted investment from UCL’s Technology Fund (UCLTF). Based on the world-leading research of two notable academics at UCL’s AI Centre Humanloop is teaching AI to improve performance with 10 times less human training than existing systems.  The UCLTF has invested in Humanloop to help the team, which includes Professors David Barber and Emine Yilmaz, to build software that can train AI models to reach high levels of accuracy while using smaller datasets through better interaction with their human users.

Machine Labs has raised a Seed Extension round of £1 million ($1.25 million) lead by Techstart Ventures alongside the founders, the angel investors Bill Dobbie and Richard Freedman, and the British Business Bank. An additional £100,000 was provided in grant funding by Amazon and Scottish Enterprise.