Eva Rez from Episode 1 gives her explores Investing in Computing Architecture in the second part of this series.

Episode 1's Eva Rez gives her insight into the opportunities and challenges around investing in Computing Architecture.

Rockstart has selected the startups for its 2nd AI accelerator program located in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. Talented women and men from seven different countries will spend the next 180 days building and refining their products, talking to mentors, and connecting to potential investors and customers. 

Foresight Group announces the £1.5m growth capital investment into Inovo Robotics Limited on behalf of the Foresight Williams Technology EIS Fund.

Inovo is developing a low-cost collaborative robot (“cobot”) that can integrate into existing workforce processes. Inovo’s modular design means the cobot can be easily adapted to varying customer requirements.

Henry Wood and Jonathan Cheung, previously senior engineers at Northrop Grumman, founded Inovo in 2016. Both founders possess deep technical expertise and experience of delivering complex engineering development projects and, between them, they have more than 30 years of combined experience in robotics and engineering.

Aiden.ai, a London based AI analytics startup, announced today that it has raised a $1.6 million seed round to fuel the company’s rapid growth and the development of the first AI powered marketing analyst.

The round has been led by Partech. Other notable investors include Sophia Bendz, who previously led marketing at Spotify for 7 years and Nicolas Pinto, founder of Perceptio which was eventually acquired by Apple.

Klydo, the innovation research assistant that uses advanced machine learning technology to help consumer brands accelerate their product innovation, has announced a £1m funding round, led by Episode 1. Paul McNabb, Managing Partner of Episode 1, commented, "this was one of those where everything came together. A strong technical founding team, truly innovative technology and a clear customer use case."  The round, which also included investment from retail and consumer sector specialist True and prominent angel investor William Tunstall-Pedoe (Founder of AI assistant "Evi", acquired by Amazon to create Alexa), will be used to expand the core team and accelerate Klydo's reach in the consumer brand space.

SLAMcore, a UK company developing spatial artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for robots and drones, has raised $5m in funding led by global technology investor Amadeus Capital Partners. Existing investors Mirai Creation Fund and Toyota AI Ventures joined the round alongside newcomers MMC Ventures and Octopus Ventures.

“The robotics revolution may seem just around the corner but there is still a big gap between the videos we see on the internet and real-world robots,” said CEO, Owen Nicholson. “SLAMcore is helping robot and drone creators to bridge the gap between demos and commercially-viable systems.” 

Nosto, a leader in ecommerce personalization and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for retail, has raised USD $7.4 million led by European investment companies Tesi, Open Ocean and Idinvest. Nosto’s innovative retail personalization solutions have fueled a three-year growth rate of 260 percent in North America driven by deep relationships with 2,500 of the world’s fastest growing retail brands. To date, Nosto has raised more than $25 million from investors to further expand its leadership in artificial intelligence and deep learning for retail.

Spotinst has raised $35 million in a Series-B funding round for its AI based workload management platform, which helps companies to manage and optimize their cloud computing spend across several cloud providers.

The funding round was led by Highland, with participation from existing investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital, and Vertex Ventures. Spotinst has now raised approximately $52m since launch.

Founded by Amiram Shachar, Liran Polak and Aharon Twizer in 2015, Spotinst helps businesses to manage their compute infrastructure across different cloud providers, while also achieving savings of 80% on average on regular cloud computing costs, by tapping into excess compute capacity in data centres operated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

On the dot, the machine learning-driven last mile delivery start-up, and part of CitySprint Group, has announced today it has received an additional investment of £8 million from its parent company, which is itself PE-funded. This new round will help fund On the dot’s further growth: product development, senior hires and international expansion, and builds on the £17.7 million invested in On the dot since its establishment in 2015. Globally, more than $11 billion (£8.5 billion) has been invested in start-ups disrupting the last mile delivery market since 2007.

Electric autonomous vehicle company, the Academy of Robotics, has closed its latest funding round in under six hours. Investment came in so quickly that founder William Sachiti turned down an additional £500,000 that was offered.

The Academy of Robotics is currently developing Kar-Go, the autonomous delivery vehicle. Kar-Go hopes to shake-up the delivery market by removing 90% of the costs involved in making a delivery – helping to increase profits for logistics companies and decrease costs for consumers.

By using a combination of advanced robotics and driverless vehicle technology, Kar-Go is designed to autonomously drive on unmarked roads such as residential areas. Unlike many driverless vehicles that are best-suited to main roads and highways, Kar-Go is specifically designed with small, residential side-streets in mind.

Hazy, the London-based AI company enabling ethical, effortless and GDPR-compliant data sharing for responsible businesses, has announced an additional $1.8 million seed funding led by UCL Technology Fund, alongside Nationwide Building Society, Pentland, Amadeus Capital Partners, AI Seed and other investors.

This takes Hazy’s total seed funding to $2.8 million following a $1 million investment from M12 and Notion, awarded to the company in May, after Hazy was declared the European winner of global startup competition Innovate.AI.

Hazy, founded less than 18 months ago, was spun out of UCL (University College London), and raised £340,000 pre-seed in October 2017 in a round led by the UCL Technology Fund, which is managed by Albion Capital in collaboration with UCLB.