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.

A.I.-powered reputation management and decision support platform, Signal Media, has announced a $16 million series B funding round. The funding round was led and priced by GMG Ventures LP. MMC Ventures was the largest investor in the round, which included a debt facility from Kreos Capital. Other investors include Frontline, Hearst Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and LocalGlobe.

Other Mind, Inc. the first intelligent assistant that simplifies your digital life, has closed its seed funding round. The capital raise closed at USD $640,000. Other Mind will use the funding to finalize platform development and drive product enhancements and testing, with a view to launching in late 2018. 

Aistemos, the leading provider of patent analytics software, has today announced it has secured an investment of £3m. Beringea, the international growth capital investor, led the Series A funding round. The funding will support the expansion of Aistemos’ core product, Cipher, and the development of a range of products focused on specific sectors, designed to enable businesses to access data about patented technology with greater speed and accuracy.

Leading deeptech VC, IQ Capital, has held the first close of its £125m third fund, IQ Capital Fund III, at £92 million. The fund will invest at Seed and Series A stages into UK deeptech companies with transformational deep-tech, AI or disruptive algorithms at their core and led by visionary founders.

Matr, the online teaching platform, has announced it has closed a £4.75 million Series A investment round led by the UCL Technology Fund and Downing Ventures, with follow on investment from Ananda and innovation charity Nesta, and Sherry Coutu joining as an angel investor. The company has now raised £8.25 million in funding.

By Robert Whitby-Smith, Albion Capital

Agorai, an integrated marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and the data assets that fuel them, is announcing it has committed to invest £20 million in the UK AI market. The investment will help accelerate the economic benefits that can be generated by leveraging the power of AI and its ability to transform society and positively impact the UK economy. The multi-year investment announced today will be distributed over the next five years. It will span the AI ecosystem by focusing on three key areas: education, empowerment, and entrepreneurship.

Hailo, a company developing a proprietary chip for deep learning on edge devices, today announced the completion of a $12.5 million Series A round. The company’s investors include Ourcrowd.com, Maniv Mobility, the Drive accelerator fund: Next Gear; as well as angel investors, Hailo Chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors CEO Gil Agmon. The company will use the funding to further develop its deep learning processor, which will deliver datacenter processing capacity to edge devices. This latest funding round brings the total raised to date by the Tel Aviv-based company to $16 million.

Blackwood Seven, the Copenhagen based provider of real-time AI powered media planning software, today announces a fundraising round of €17 million to support expansion of the business across Europe, the US and Asia.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as the most frequently mentioned theme in discussions among the key disruptive technologies during the first quarter (Q1) of 2018 on Twitter, according to leading data and analytics company GlobalData.