FNA has closed a $5.5m Series A investment round led by IQ Capital, with participation from GETTYLAB. The funds will be used to further develop the FNA platform and solutions to help financial regulators and institutions operationalize advanced data analytics, identify fault lines in the financial system and prepare better for financial crisis and cyber threats.

Standard Cognition, which is building the next interface of retail, has raised a $35M Series B funding round led by the EQT Ventures fund with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator. This brings Standard’s total funding to date to more than $86M, and its post-money valuation to $535M - more than a 2x increase since the company raised its Series A in Nov. 2018.

Machine learning start-up Futr. has secured £2.4m in seed funding in a round led by VC firm Praetura Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate delivery of the firms’ ambitious tech road-map, with the team more than doubling this year to meet the large demand for Futr.’s products. Founded in 2017 by Andy Wilkins and Lee Skyrme, Futr.’s conversation-as-a-service is already powering clients across a range of industries, including the police, central and local government and a number of leading private sector organisations. Futr.’s technology simplifies how organisations deliver their services on the channels that their staff and consumers use every day, like Alexa, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, in over 100 languages.

Zegami, the augmented intelligence company helping businesses unlock their data potential through visual data exploration, has raised £1.25M in equity funding. Its latest round of fund raising was led by RT Capital Management and the Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund, with existing investors Oxford Sciences Innovation plc and Oxford University Innovation also contributing.  The funding will enable Zegami to continue developing its next generation data visualisation platform and raise its profile through marketing and commercial partnerships – in particular with LiveTiles and Microsoft.

Blackfinch Ventures has invested £700,000 in innovative tech start-up Warwick Analytics. Founded in 2011, this London-based firm is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based data spin-out from the University of Warwick. Warwick Analytics delivers powerful text analytics for contact centres based on proprietary machine learning. 

Ingenious has led an investment round into Over-C Limited, a London-based analytics company focused on operational performance in the workforce management market. Ingenious helped raise an additional £5.5 million in equity funding, bringing the total raised to £10 million.

BlockClaim, the first hybrid artificial intelligence and blockchain technology solution developed for the insurance industry, has successfully completed its seed funding round with a £500,000 investment.

AI data extraction start-up SuccessData, formerly known as sc.io, has closed a £600k investment round led by B2B startup investor SuperSeed. This investment will allow the start-up to finance the hiring of data scientists and machine learning experts that can drive strategy and the growth of the business. This announcement follows the company relaunching its global brand to reflect its ambitious international growth plans for the European and US markets.

London-based Q-Bot, an EMVC portfolio robotics company that has developed a solution to remotely apply underfloor insulation, has successfully completed a £3m Series A investment round to fund the next stage of its growth.

Q-Bot has developed a range of robotic and AI technologies that can survey, maintain and upgrade buildings. Q-Bot uses robots to apply underfloor insulation underneath suspended floors to improve their energy efficiency and comfort with much less disruption and cost than traditional methods. Q-Bot’s customers include housing associations, local authorities, private homeowners and landlords.

New research from Intertrust shows an overwhelming majority (94%) of UK-based financial services industry decision-makers believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the most potential to revolutionise the sector over the next five years, considerably ahead of blockchain (53%) and the Internet of Things (24%). 

Suir Valley Ventures, the entrepreneur-led venture capital fund launched in partnership with Shard Capital Partners LLP to invest in early stage software companies across a range of high-tech verticals, is pleased to announce its participation alongside Atlantic Bridge, in a €1.1 million investment round for Ambisense Ltd, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) environmental analytics company. The round was also supported by Enterprise Ireland and a number of private investors.

Hampleton Partners’ latest analysis of the Artificial Intelligence M&A market reveals that over 150 deals were disclosed in 2018, up from 105 deals in 2017. The first half of 2019 is also showing impressive AI-related M&A momentum, with 65 deals already recorded and a total of near 100 deals forecast for the half-year only. In terms of market value, AI is forecast to grow from $21.46 billion in 2018 to $190 billion by 2025 – in other words, to grow nine-fold over the next seven-year period.