Companies

Cost/time efficiency and reproducibility are chemistry’s top two problems which affect up to 90% of all chemistry globally and waste up to 80% of R&D resource.

Chemastery are building an automation solution for the chemical laboratory which will quadruple the world’s manufacture and R&D capability. Their mission is to build the infrastructure for chemistry and make science more efficient and robust.

They have co-led chemistry with engineering projects for five years and have previously built a chemical automation solution which was published in Science. They also have a PoC and commercial pilots.

Anna Andreou is a chemical methodologist specialising in solving science problems. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge and with 10+ years of lab experience, she understands the workflow and problems of the customer. She has four years of start-up experience as a first hire.

Stefan Glatzel is the Jack of all trades. He holds a PhD in Material Science from the Max Planck Institute and has worked as a software and hardware engineer in various positions. He has six years of leading mechanical engineering experience, including three years as principal development engineer in a start-up.

Circuit Mind is using AI to completely automate the design of electronic circuits. Every year £40bn and 1.5bn hours are spent globally in tedious and repetitive circuit board design work. We are building extremely complex artificial intelligence that takes in the requirements for a circuit board and outputs the circuit board final design, ready for manufacture. This means better circuits, designed orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost.

Tomide Adesanmi is an electronic systems engineer with a Master’s from the University of Leeds. He spent over four years building high integrity AR displays for pilots at BAE Systems. His expertise in complex systems design is central to Circuit Mind’s technology.

Basilio Gentile has two Master’s degrees, including one in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD from ETH Zurich with a focus on mathematical algorithms for complex systems. He declined postdocs at Harvard and Berkeley to start Circuit Mind. His mastery of high-performance algorithms is at the core of Circuit Mind’s solution.

Cleo is an A.I. assistant to manage your finances. Using machine learning we automatically classify your transactions, deliver relevant insights into your spending and give you a clear overview of your finances. And users can get all of this, just by sending Cleo a text.

Rather than creating a bank, Cleo sits on top of existing infrastructure to give our users an elegant and user-friendly banking experience. By integrating APIs for banks and other financial service providers, Cleo aims to become a hub for each user’s banking activity.

ClickMechanic is a marketplace for car mechanics. The service is underpinned by Europe’s first industry standard car repair quote engine. The system uses millions of industry data points combined with data mapping, cleaning and machine learning to provide greater transparency and trust to the car repair process

Andrew Jervis has a Masters Degree in Enterprise and Innovation from The University of Manchester, and previously worked in banking. He previously started an automotive parts aggregator which he sold prior to joining Entrepreneur First.

Felix Kenton has a Masters in Information Systems from Imperial and previously started a gaming company.

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

Immunotherapies leverage our own immune system to fight cancer cells and represent the cutting-edge of cancer therapy, but they can also cause toxic side-effects and patient deaths.

By integrating biophysics and cell biology, Exogene’s proprietary machine learning technology enables fast discovery of safer immunotherapies, at scale.

Exogene’s technology already outperforms the state-of-the-art, and they’re setting up pilots with the top European immunotherapy company and three academic institutions to validate and expand it.

Federico Paoletti is an award-winning Oxford Computational Oncology PhD whose doctoral research was featured on the cover of the EMBO Journal, a leading molecular biology journal. He previously worked at the World Health Organization where he spearheaded the assessment of novel cancer prevention strategies.

Andrea Mambrini is an award-winning Computer Science PhD. As a data scientist, he developed bio-inspired algorithms for the European Space Agency to send space probes to Jupiter, scaled the machine learning team of Portent.io to acquisition, and revolutionised the marketing strategy of Vodafone using deep learning

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.

Flaime is revolutionising cloud gaming. Our rendering technology will enable content producers to deliver their games at scale, in AAA quality and on any device, at a fraction of the cost.

Market leaders (e.g. Google) are racing to build the Netflix of games, which will be disastrous for independent publishers. Our mission is to put the power back in the hands of developers by providing a cost effective and high-quality solution for delivering cloud content.

We are building a patent portfolio and are backed by world leading advisors.

Sharon Reid has 20 years experience in the entertainment industry and has been involved in gaming since the start of her career. From launching games on the first PlayStation through to productions that blur the lines of film and gaming, her work sits at the intersection of VFX, entertainment and games.

Dr Davy Smith is an AI researcher (PhD in neuro-evolutionary algorithm design), with a post-doc in interactive and adaptive broadcasting technologies (University of York, BBC R&D) and a background in creative practice (MRes Digital Media). He has also scaled AI start-up tech stacks.

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.