UCL AI spinout Re:infer raises $3.5m

Re:infer, a spinout from UCL’s AI lab, has raised $3.5m (£2.5m) in a round led by Touchstone Innovations.

The artificial intelligence start-up, which delivers cognitive automation, also drew support from Crane Ventures alongside existing backers Seedcamp and Dr Jason Kingdon, an AI pioneer.

"I'm really proud to have helped support re:infer,” said Dr David Barber, co-founder of re:infer. “The core team are all UCL CS graduates with Marius and Cristi having been star performers on our MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning. Ed completed a very successful PhD in Machine Learning with me a few years ago and we've worked on different business ideas since then. This investment highlights the strengths that we have in the department in AI and is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of other existing and latent commercialisation opportunities."

Re:infer’s deep learning tech automates the interpretation of communications data and bridges the gap between humans and information technology, and makes human conversations understandable at scale and actionable to machines.

The successful product is a B2B SaaS machine learning and analytics platform controlled and monitored via a web UI, which is already used by e-commerce firms including UK tech unicorn Farfetch, some major banks and insurance firms.

“We are at the dawn of enterprise automation and re:infer is leading the way for customers who want to realise its benefits,” said Dr Ed Challis, co-founder and CEO of Re:infer.

“Cognitive automation gives enterprise service businesses the scaling economics of digital-first players like Amazon and Google. Re:infer gives our clients’ infrastructure a new perceptual capability to listen and understand all of their communications in real time and at scale. Clients can detect and service customer needs they’d otherwise miss – accounting for huge increases in customer satisfaction. By automating communications data, we drastically improve fulfilment from hours to seconds and massively increase throughput and efficiency - in some settings, over a thousand times."

The company will use the money to further develop its cognitive automation product suite and hire across sales and marketing.

You can find out more about re:infer on their website.

Read the full story on UK Tech News.