CNC milling machines are at the heart of manufacturing with almost half a trillion dollars’ worth of components produced by them each year. Despite this, their software is in the dark ages. We’re researching and applying breakthrough AI methods to control these machines automatically and more optimally than ever before, revolutionising how the things around us are made. Our mission is to make milling machines one click devices that can produce a part easily, efficiently and with minimal human intervention, effectively halving the cost of their use.

Theo Saville has a master’s in manufacturing and mechanical Engineer from Warwick. He has worked in weapons development, surveillance equipment development for policing and counter-terrorism, industrial 3D printing research, as a freelance engineer, and in door-to-door sales.

Chris Emery has a master’s in computing from Imperial College London. He has been programming since he was 12, and started selling shareware when he was 15. He co-created “EventBox”, which was acquired by Realmac Software. He then worked as a software engineer at Google, before leaving and founding and selling Five Sided Software.

Code Kingdoms wants to inspire kids to learn one of the essential creative skills of the 21st Century – coding.

Code Kingdoms allows kids aged 6 to 13 to learn computational thinking by designing their own game levels with real JavaScript code, and then sharing them with friends. This also promotes essential skills like problem-solving, teamwork and time management.

CodeReg makes regulatory change in finance as simple as a software update. Financial institutions face a mountain of regulation. Manual processes can’t handle the complex, interwoven and shifting rules, exposing firms to massive fines and costing billions to change systems in response. Our compliance engine automatically verifies and monitors financial compliance. We can provide real-time compliance insight and flag any potential breaches before it’s too late.

Samuel Watts spent four years in quantitative finance, building and advising on regulatory systems for both major European banking supervisors and financial firms. He holds Master’s degrees in Maths and Mathematical Finance from the Universities of Warwick and Oxford.

Stacy-Ann Sinclair spent a decade building high-frequency trading systems and globally scalable data infrastructure for three tier one investment banks. As a VP at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she led development of a unified platform for MiFID II compliance. She has a CS degree from City University.

Context Scout is a research-led software company developing new information retrieval and machine learning based approaches for web search, automated professional assistance and task based IR. After raising their seed round in 2016 they’ve expanded their team to include PhDs on topics such as NLP, knowledge representation and deep learning.

Marc Sloan has a PhD from UCL in Information Retrieval and is the author of the book ‘Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling’. He has published extensively on the topic of predictive web search, including during his time working at Microsoft Research.

Andy O’Harney holds a Master’s in Machine Learning from Glasgow University and worked on computational neuroscience for the Medical Research Council and Medical University of South Carolina before joining fintech startup Singletrack. Marc and Andy met on EF and started Context Scout.

Converge is a hardware and software platform that works with existing sensors to store, analyze and display their data, automatically, in real­time. We charge a subscription fee per connected sensor, and a fixed fee for any hardware and installation.

Raphael Scheps is a Cambridge trained theoretical physicist, with years of experience in large-scale data analytics at Mellanox and the Weizmann institute.

Gideon Farrell is an astrophysicist from Cambridge with 10 years of software experience. Gideon has worked on Intel’s pioneering IoT project, WISP.

Creative AI gives every business the power of a dedicated marketing team – what use to take them hours, now takes them just seconds. They currently use machine learning to automatically create social media posts, and they’ll later start optimising other marketing activities.

Yazan Al Alami has founded and grew 2 marketing companies, where he helped local and global brands 10x their reach and engagement on social media. He graduated with a Master’s in engineering from Imperial College London.

Lukas Dirzys is an expert in optimised image and text generation and he won the Google Prize for the best Master’s dissertation at the University of Edinburgh.

Credit Kudos is a challenger credit bureau developing a Financial Behaviour Score based on real-time financial data. The company recently became the first of its kind to receive full authorisation from the FCA as a Credit Reference Agency. The Credit Kudos platform gathers information from your online banking to determine your suitability when applying for financial products.

Matt Schofield and Freddy Kelly met studying Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Prior to founding Credit Kudos, Matt was leading Data Science teams for Universal Music Group (UMG) and CTO of UMG’s music discovery platform, SpinnUp. Freddy joined Bitnami (YC W13) after graduation where he was responsible for development of their cloud launchpad, deployed initially for Microsoft and later a number of other cloud vendors including Google, Amazon and VMWare. Freddy went on to be the first engineer at A16z backed financial analytics platform, TXN.

CreditMint is decentralising corporate lending. The corporate debt industry is migrating from a bank-led model towards smaller lenders. But these new-wave lenders are tied to constant cycles of reconciliation, and trading is slow and expensive. Furthermore, companies lose track of their creditors and the market is structurally illiquid.

We fix this using a public blockchain as the shared ledger for corporate debt. We provide a dealmaking platform; a trading layer; and a settlements facility, all communicating with one digital asset on Ethereum.

There will be 20 billion connected devices by 2020 in buildings, electric grids, transportation systems and other critical infrastructures. This creates huge security risk. We develop quantum cybersecurity products in the form of hardware and software which harness the best of both worlds, combining cutting edge quantum technologies with the best of modern cryptography. Our products are safe, secure, and can be integrated into existing network infrastructure with minimal disruption.

Shahram Mossayebi has a PhD in Post-Quantum Cryptography from Royal Holloway University of London. He also has an Information Security Master‘s degree. He has written scientific papers on the security of modern cryptosystems against quantum adversaries.

Patrick Camilleri has a PhD in Neuromorphic Engineering from Otto-von-Guericke University in Germany. He worked at Philips Semiconductors Zurich where he designed semiconductor chips for mobile phones. Most recently Patrick was a Postdoc at the University of Manchester where he researched parallel computing.

Data Hygge helps companies spot, prioritise and solve experience issues. Bad online experience is costing companies £62 billion. From broken buttons to long support wait times, there are thousands of potential issues. But no one way for companies to find them. We’re building a product that monitors customer touch points, automatically detects experience issues using machine learning, and gives companies the right information to fix them.

Mikkel Dengsøe spent 5 years at Google leading data science for customer experience. He has honed his machine learning techniques using the largest database of websites in the world.

Mario Hayashi has a Master’s in Computing from Imperial College London. He built the analytics platform at Nimble Storage, handling petabytes of data. He has also led product development at multiple startups.

Marketplace for outstanding musicians

Eyn is a biometric security company.  We combine advanced facial anti-spoofing and public key cryptography to transform your smartphone into an ID verification device with military grade security. This gives anyone an unbreakable biometric identity key.

Hasan Sheikh Faridul has a PhD in computer vision and machine learning. He worked for 7 years in the security industry in world leading companies such as Safran Security and Identity. As a research scientist, he developed fingerprint recognition algorithms that is now deployed on major international Airports.

Mohamed Ben Arbia completed his master’s at EPFL specialising in signal processing and machine learning. He worked at Technicolor R&D on real time audio application and was a research student at LCAV lab at EPFL.

Faultless AI eliminates human error in manufacturing. Human error costs manufacturers $2.6 trillion every year. Robots aren’t the solution. There are millions of tasks that will remain beyond the abilities of robots for generations. With computer vision, our solution makes people reliable.

Nigel Boielle completed a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Auckland. He has over 13 years of experience in the automotive industry, working as a chief engineer at Ford, Jaguar and Ricardo. He has experience in every step of the design and manufacturing process.

Steve Gaukrodger has more than 13 years of experience using cutting edge technology to solve complex human problems. He has built air traffic control interfaces, medical devices and artificial intelligence systems for poker. He has three degrees from the University of Canterbury, including computer vision and psychology.

Flexciton is building cutting edge, intelligent planning and scheduling software, powered by A.I. to help end-users of industrial machinery improve operational efficiency and reduce operational cost.

Jamie Potter has a Master’s in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Oxford, where he graduated top of his year. He worked for a consultancy firm specialising in Energy. He was the lead developer of more than twenty software projects for large customers such as DECC, National Grid and RWE. The software was used to make multi-billion pound decisions.

Dr Dionysios Xenos did his PhD at Imperial College London, researching the optimisation of rotating equipment to reduce operational costs. He published 12 papers on the subject, and collaborated with world-leading chemical company BASF and one of the largest gas suppliers, Statoil, to put his research into action.

Ginie AI turns term sheets into contracts. A first draft of a 100 page M&A contract would have taken days – it now takes seconds. To make this possible, we use a new type of generative adversarial nets developed from our prior research. In addition, we have developed a patent-pending method to access highly confidential data for the first time.

Rafie Faruq has an MSc in Machine Learning from UCL. He has founded multiple tech startups, and has commercial experience as a derivatives trader.

Nitish Mutha is a deep learning expert with an MSc in Machine Learning from UCL. He has 5 years’ software engineering experience in a Fortune 500 company. Nitish has won several national awards for technical projects.

Madeleine Royle previously qualified as a solicitor from a major US law firm. As Product Manager she brings her experience in financial and corporate law to Ginie AI.

GTN is a quantum leap in drug discovery. We search the astronomically large space of potential drug molecules with our patented technology based on quantum physics and machine learning, discovering drugs that were previously hidden from view. We can discover better drugs, more quickly, at half the cost.

Noor Shaker is a professor from Aalborg University in Copenhagen with ten years of academic experience in machine learning. She has published more than 50 papers with 1000 citations and an entire book on generative networks. She has won a number of awards and grants for her research.

Vid Stojevic has spent the past ten years working on string theory and tensorial methods in quantum physics. He has held postdocs at UCL and the University of Vienna, published in numerous high impact journals, and his work has been presented at leading conferences.

Hadean is unifying the performance and capabilities of HPC (high-performance computing) and the commoditisation and scale of ‘big data’, with easy-to-use development tools.

The applications of the technology range from financial market prediction and climate modelling to deep learning and synthetic biology.

Alec Mocatta built an indoor positioning company whose technology beat out Cisco and Estimote for accuracy. He sold that company during EF to work full time on Hadean.

Headlight AI provides intelligent sensing and mapping software for harsh environments. Underground and other complex environments are dangerous, slow, and expensive to map and inspect. This is due to a lack of GPS, poor visibility, and hazardous conditions. Our patent-pending technology generates accurate 3D maps, even in times of poor visibility.

Jameel Marafie has conducted a PhD at Imperial College London in photophysics and optoelectronics. He holds Master’s degrees in Plastic Electronics from Imperial College London and in Chemistry from the University of Bath, respectively. He has also worked in consulting for over seven years.

Puneet Chhabra has conducted a PhD between Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt universities in a new form of LiDAR signal processing and deep learning. He has an MSc degree in Computer Vision and Robotics. He won an innovation award for autonomous systems whilst at BAE Systems.

Hubble is an online marketplace for renting office space. Hubble wraps the entire transaction: users search across office types, pay rent, sign contracts, in just a few clicks.

Imperium Drive is developing teleoperation technology to accelerate deployment of shared and autonomous mobility.

Teleoperation complements autonomy by allowing a remote human operator to
take control of the vehicle in complex environments where autonomous vehicles (AVs) today still fall short. Imperium Drive is developing an advanced teleoperation system that is highly reliable, particularly in poor or varying network conditions. We believe teleoperation is essential for safe and scalable deployments of AVs on public roads.

We have successfully built and tested our first full-scale prototype and currently in advanced talks for pilots with potential customers in the shared and autonomous mobility space.

Koosha Kaveh has over 10 years of experience in strategy consulting and built his own consulting practice reaching $5M in annual revenues. He has extensive experience navigating through complex B2B sales cycles. Koosha holds an MEng degree in Electrical Engineering from Cambridge University.

Sandip Gangakhedkar is a wireless systems engineer with 8 years of experience working for Huawei, Bell Labs and Nokia. He developed the first 5G-based teleoperated driving prototype in early 2017. He holds 20+ patents and has led several connected car trials in Europe. Sandip has an M.S. from Télécom ParisTech.

Navid Nourani Vatani is a roboticist with over 15 years of experience developing autonomous trucks, trains, as well as off-road vehicles. He has led multiple R&D teams at Volkswagen Group Research, MAN Truck & Bus and Siemens Mobility. Navid holds a PhD in Robotics from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Inoviv matches patients with the right drugs. We develop blood tests for major diseases to work out which patients will respond to drugs. Our unique technology, based on targeted proteomics, measures hundreds of molecules in the blood at a fraction of the cost of competitor tests, meaning we can develop tests where others cannot.

Michael Dove has worked in consulting and business development at top pharmaceutical and healthcare organisations (GSK, Novartis, Merck, Boston Scientific, NHS). He has relationships with hundreds of life sciences contacts up to C-suite level. He worked on two biotech startups prior to this one.

Ernestas Sirka is a leading researcher in proteomics and clinical test development. He has 13 publications in the field and has brought five tests to market. He has a first-class degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Bath and has spent his career working at Pfizer and University College London.

Insurami is re-inventing the process for leasing office spaces, unlocking £200bn in the US, UK and Europe alone. Our proprietary risk model enables landlords to vet customers in seconds, and lower upfront deposit costs by 90%.

Majed Chaaraoui spent 5 years at Blenheim Chalcot where he grew tech start-ups in financial services and property. He has worked in consulting and investment banking, and has a BEng in Electronics & Communications Engineering and an MSc in Financial Mathematics from Leeds University.

Arnor Davidsson is experienced in software engineering, product management and UX. He has worked in both established and early stage tech companies, and previously co-founded his own start-up. He holds a BSc in Engineering Management and an MSc in Computer Science.