Applied AI is Tech Nation’s first growth programme for Artificial Intelligence to help the UK’s most promising founders who are applying AI in practical areas and creating real-world impact. The programme is based on peer-to-peer support and the shared experience of later-stage founders, all curated under the values of honesty, intimacy and trust.
We know that scaling an AI company comes with its own set of unique challenges. This is a network that will unpack the AI-specific scaling journey, led by those who have done it and with the support of like-minded peers.
Applied AI is not currently accepting applications, but you can pre-register your interest in the programme.
Tech Nation’s Applied AI 4.0 growth programme is back and it’s bigger than ever. This year’s cohort includes 35 innovative companies that are transforming the tech world and creating unreal solutions, for the real world.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @Abtrace
Abtrace uses machine learning - natural language processing - to detect signals indicating risk of ill health and to support timely interventions. Primary care has the responsibility for early detection for a vast array of diseases across the population, where prompt identification and treatment can prevent severe harm to patients. The workload required for primary care is vast, repetitive and continues indefinitely. But access to electronic health record systems and clinical automation of proactive monitoring allows predictive earlier detection of disease and avoidance of preventable conditions. Abtrace's focus has been on applications where the triple bottom line can be delivered at scale– healthier patients, happier clinicians, and reduction in health costs.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @AdvaiLtd
Advai has developed unique technology that allows data scientists and businesses to run advanced automated stress tests and red teaming on neural network-based AI systems. This allows them to identify strengths and weaknesses in their system to predict where the AI will perform well or poorly. This capability will open up new opportunities to get away from a reliance on 'Aacuracy' as a metric - the aim is to predict where AI is most likely to fail. The technology has been developed for the UK Ministry of Defence (Advai owns the IP), and will now be brought to the commercial sector.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @antobotAI
Antobot develops affordable robotics for sustainable agriculture. Headquartered in Chelmsford, Essex with a subsidiary in Shanghai, China, the team is focused on building products that deliver real impact to farms to enable them to become economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. Its vertically-integrated robotic AI solutions are comprised of: a modular robot platforms optimised for agriculture and powered by electrical or solar energy; a universal Robot Control Unit (uRCU®) aka a robot “brain” which combines all of the modules needed for robotic control and intelligence into one unit creating a more reliable, universally configurable and more affordable solution than individual components; computer vision and autonomous navigation software systems utilising AI to autonomously undertake various tasks including removing time-intensive tasks and collecting and analysing crop data
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @AreteMedTech
Arete Medical is a precision and preventative medicine company. It develops tools to help measure, interpret, and inform people with long-term respiratory conditions and their health care team, to help match the right treatment at the right time to that person. It has developed a respiratory medical device - the Respicorder - and a companion digital health app. It targets chronic respiratory conditions: asthmas, COPD, long COVID, for at-home and remote monitoring. Arete Medical has passed the ISO13485 Stage 1 audit, and expects to pass Stage 2 and receive CE marking in September 2022.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @Auquan
Auquan makes information discovery quick, effortless and cost-effective for enterprise by automating the entire unstructured text processing pipeline. It believes that the starting point of enterprise research in any function - investment research, risk analysis, KYB or customer service - is that information search, collection, cleaning and connecting should be fully automated. Today, this process is manual; human analysts not only waste 70% of their time on this, they are also unable to cope with increasing data overload and miss information. Auquan automates parts of the research workflow which are always present, repetitive and do not require human discretion, to allow clients to get to the useful, unique, impactful insights much faster and from a much larger volume of information than they can analyse manually.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @getcarv
Carv is the world's first digital ski coach in your pocket. Its smart inserts, each containing 48 pressure sensors, and trackers retrofit to any ski boot to measure motion (in 9-axis) and pressure data. Working with top-level instructors from PSIA, CSIA and Interski, Carv uses algorithms that effectively assess ski technique. Carv has the capacity to transform ski technique by providing one-on-one coaching for each day of skiing, through real-time, audio feedback, and the solution takes the learning of thousands of athletes and uses it to improve the technique of an individual skier in fun, interactive and effective ways. Carv uses these hardware and software components to provide in-depth analysis of your ski technique presented to you on your smartphone and gives real-time feedback through your headphones to help you take your skiing to the next level.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @checkstep
Checkstep enables online platforms to be safe and compliant through a software where AI and humans interact to give a fast, consistent, cost-effective decision on every piece of user content, being text, image, video or audio, and this in every language. It provides all the necessary tools to scale the trust and safety operations of online platforms by increasing the effectiveness and well-being of their moderation teams. It is designed for multiple roles within the trust and safety department, including not only moderators but also data scientists, head of policy, software engineers, and auditors for online harm compliance.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @Electron_Rx
electronRx is a deep tech company building the interface between technology, the human body and healthcare organisations that will transform how we deliver healthcare and treat disease. Its scalable technology can save millions of lives and billions in healthcare costs by transforming treatment for the world’s biggest killers; heart disease and stroke. For less than £1 per patient, it enables mass screening for heart irregularities through our easy-to-use, highly accurate app. Simply by holding their smartphone for 30 seconds, patients are empowered with early intervention to prevent disease onset, debilitating illness, and death. In the long term, this is paving the way for personalised digital medicine, realising electronRx's vision of providing every patient with access to a digital therapeutic companion that can seamlessly sense their physiological environment and inform personalised therapeutic interventions in real time.
South West | Artificial Intelligence | @FilmilyApp
Using patented technology, Filmily harvests video content from thousands of mobile phones at events. It uses AI and computer vision to understand everything about each second of each recording and add relevant tags (faces, brands, objects) to understand what the camera saw. This data can be used with AI to then create branded films for clients. Clients then create campaigns based on their marketing objectives; resulting in branded films for use in stadiums or social media. Fans all get their own personalised content back, with them as the star - tailored by age, location, emotion, sex. This is all AI driven and frictionless to the fans.
West Midlands | Artificial Intelligence | @FluenceWorld
Fluence is a forensic linguistics and machine learning (ML) company. The team has developed proprietary AI that surfaces complex hidden relationships between a company's documents (i.e. marketing assets) and KPIs (i.e. market share), allowing clients to focus on activities that deliver maximum value. Fluence has found a niche in the pharmaceutical industry. So far, Fluence's technology has allowed clients to: audit vast portfolios of marketing content (what they have, how it impacts growth); surface the market-share contribution of assets across local operating countries; hyper-personalise and hyper-segment marketing interactions to maximize the probability of customer engagement; modularize current content portfolios to allow for faster content approvals and more customized interactions with healthcare professionals.
London | Artificial Intelligence
Forestreet has an AI SaaS platform that allows users to do real time vendor and market discover in any market, in any language.
South East | Artificial Intelligence
Fuell Limited develops and exploits Human Monitoring Solutions (HMS) that prevent workplace and commercial vehicle accidents caused by operator fatigue, distraction and other health issues. Using computer vision and artificial intelligence, it has developed two HMS products to be integrated into a variety of vehicles and industrial settings. Its personalised Driver Monitoring System is a driver facing ‘dashcam’ that intelligently builds a profile of the driver over time making fatigue and distraction estimates unique to that driver. Its second product is an Operator Monitoring System (OMS) that utilises cutting edge fabric design to monitor key health indicators including heartrate, fatigue, hydration and core body temperature, monitored remotely in real-time.
South East | Artificial Intelligence | @TeamHerdify
Herdify has developed a machine learning tool that alerts brands to casual conversations in which consumers mention them, while being GDPR compliant and without using third party cookies, getting ahead of Google's plan to block these in 2023. If brands know where these conversations are happening they can influence behaviour, cheaper and faster for both growth and churn prevention. The issue is that these conversations happen offline, in places like WhatsApp or down the pub, or in the gym, etc making them hard to harness - until now.
North West | Artificial Intelligence
Hiphops applies a proprietary machine learning pipeline to help any technical team automate, control and speed up software releases in just a few clicks and without needing access to the source code. Hiphops automatically tracks, analyses, categorises and automates all software releases. It takes away the most annoying and time-consuming burdens for technical teams with out-of-the box automations, a machine learning pipeline which is 97% accurate, and the ability to operate with metadata access only. All technical teams will improve their level of control, throughput and visibility by using Hiphops. Hiphops analyses pull requests and provides advanced config options to allow small, safe changes to sail through code review instantly.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @holistic_ai
Holistic AI (HAI) provides artificial intelligence (AI) and data risk management solutions. Catering for small, medium and large sized enterprises that utilise algorithms and that seek to ensure their use is responsible and well-managed, HAI provides a Software-as-a-Service solution for organizations to monitor, control and de-risk their AI and data applications. HAI enables customers to rapidly roll out their AI and data solutions globally, accelerating their timelines and hedging ethical, legal and technical risks. To deliver its mission, HAI employs practical knowledge and academic excellence in three different directions: embedding ethics in AI; creating new metrics, methods, and processes that can improve system verification and mitigation; and scaling trusted practices.
South West | Artificial Intelligence | @SolnGroupIoT
IoT Solutions Group develops and delivers complete-package remote monitoring solutions for public and private sector businesses facing data and insight challenges. In essence, it makes smart technology usable. Its devices monitor particular conditions, feedback data and identify key patterns through AI in a usable way that supports organisations to make better decisions for sustainability, care provision, resource efficiency and more. It has a suite of tried-and-tested monitoring solutions being used in the market today including sensors for bins, water temperature, parking, care of vulnerable adults and many more.
Wales | Artificial Intelligence | @jivaai
Jiva's multimodal AI platform allows users to create, version and deploy AI models in a low code/no code environment, agnostic to data type and industry sector. The platform provides a variety of AI techniques including unique grey box Next Generation Multimodal Jiva algorithms (enabling the fusion of related models to make better predictions about the system as a whole), which are explainable in design. The user will validate and deploy the AI model that best fits their dataset, allowing rapid AI prototyping. It has products in prostate cancer detection from MRI scans and earlier prediction of liver disease. Jiva users save 80% on data science costs and time. Jiva’s proprietary algorithm is contextual in design and as such understands new knowledge will become available and is then able to be added to the Jiva model, without having to start again.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @Kortical_/
Kortical is a machine learning (ML) automation platform that accelerates the experimentation, building and deployment of ML models. It is a new breed of platform that uses AI and cloud scale to accelerate data scientists, giving them the control, code access and transparency they need to get the solution they want but with huge chunks of the data pipeline, model selection / building, hyperparameter tuning, productionisation and deployment heavily automated. It is unique due to being code optional, based on the learning that data scientists love code but they are not that skilled in deployment so would benefit from help with code templates and guidance.
Northern Ireland | Artificial Intelligence | @kraydelcares
Kraydel's mission is to improve social connectivity and independence of older adults, give peace of mind to their family, and enable better access for carers to deliver health and social care. It does this through Konnect, a TV-based solution with a simple user interface and remote control.
South East | Artificial Intelligence | @KytheraAI
Kythera AI brings intelligent life to virtual worlds - be that games, simulation or metaverse. Game developers now have fantastic tools for building huge, complex, beautiful worlds but very often life remains absent, especially that of characters engaging with a player. Building complex and performant AI tools is an expensive and time consuming task, and what’s more there are a very limited number of people with the expertise to complete it. This is an obstacle to studios of all sizes when it comes to designing a game that is filled with intelligently designed and engaging life. Kythera AI's AI middleware solves these challenges by giving developers and designers access to a full suite of advanced AI tools to create better experiences for players and users.
South East | Artificial Intelligence | @joinlegislate
Legislate makes contracts machine readable using patented knowledge graph technology so that contracts can be created, managed and searched at scale. By making contracts machine readable, it is enabling a new category of smart, open contracts which know what they contain and how they connect with third party systems and services such as insurance and payments. The platform is safe and easy enough for non-lawyers to use; the main user groups are currently in property and employment. Users create contracts by answering simple questions and the platform builds contracts in real-time based on their answers. Its knowledge graph applies the legal and logical rules of each contract to the answers to minimise contract configuration errors. Users can then electronically sign agreements in the platform and access key contract metrics and data post-signature.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @magicdotfit
MAGIC is the “Peloton of Strength Training”. It enables anyone to get personally trained by the world’s best athletes in their own invisible home gym. MAGIC allows users to perform exercises in front of an intelligent hologram mirror which replaces a human personal trainer using custom computer vision camera software. Similar to how self-driving cars autonomously guide car movement, the system applies the same technology to exercise and thereby democratises access to personal training at scale - saving people hundreds of pounds a week in fees. The AI corrects real-time form, counts reps and gives live feedback to give a completely hyper-personalised workout. This combines with patent-pending dumbbells and co-created workout content with the world's leading athletes.nSimilar to how Masterclass.com has done for the higher arts, the workout content enables anyone to be coached by the world’s best athletes including Sir Alistair Cook, Jesse Lingard, Katya Jones, and Desiree Henry.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @pcl_health
PCL Health is a technology-enabled connected care ecosystem operating on a B2B SaaS model. It usea cloud computing, AI-enabled health algorithms and IoT/wearable technology to enhance older adults’ health and wellbeing. Its vision is to seamlessly connect families to manage the health of their elderly members and provide them with peace of mind. With its technology, older people and patients can receive an appropriate level of non-intrusive, user-friendly, remote monitoring of their health from the comfort of their homes. This will help them lead their lives with independence and reduce the burden on social care at the same time.
North West | Artificial Intelligence | @recourseai
Re:course AI's platform allows customers to launch their own "Medical Metaverse" using conversational AI-powered Digital Human avatars, revolutionising how clinicians advance their skills in the £94.1bn global medical education market, initially targeting life sciences (pharma and medical devices), hospitals and institutions. The product and proprietary natural language processing (NLP) conversational models have been deployed in the US and through an NHS contract in the UK following a research study demonstrating significantly enhanced performance of clinicians.
South West | Artificial Intelligence
Reach Industries is harnessing emerging technology to augment scientists and enable the labs of the future in order to empower more efficient progress and better results for people and planet. Its integrated lab digitalisation platform, Lumi, leverages computer vision, voice and machine learning to automatically capture operational data in labs, augmenting scientists with transformative technology to manage lab operations and achieve deeper understanding of their reactions and processes. Lumi is already deployed and increasing efficiency and accelerating scientific progress in many labs across all stages and fields of life sciences. The goal is to: make the lab of the future a reality with the leading integrated lab digitalisation platform; augment scientists with transformative technology to manage lab operations; and accelerate time to solution and improving R&D efficiency
South East | Artificial Intelligence | @hellorenudeco1
Renude is an online skincare recommendation service, powered by licensed experts and artificial intelligence.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @sainaptic
sAInaptic is an educational technology company with a strong focus on AI, in particular, natural language processing. It is developing an automarking tool that evaluates free text responses to open-ended questions to provide instant and personalised teacher-like feedback to learners. Automarking, especially of open-ended questions also reduces teacher workload and standardises marking across teachers. sAInaptic's automarking capabilities are offered to students and schools via a cloud-based web app and to other organisations via API integration. The team at sAInaptic believes that affordable and personalised learning is every student’s right and that teachers should be empowered with efficient and automated tools in order to tailor lessons and targeted interventions to the real needs of the learners. Its vision is to become the trusted name in fully automated homework, revision and assessments and be a global leader in the provision of automated online high-stakes assessments.
Yorkshire | Artificial Intelligence | @insightsscaled
Scaled Insights makes prescription drugs work better. It does this by helping doctors convince patients to take the drugs AND modify their lifestyles to address the underlying causes of illness the drugs are addressing. For example, cholesterol drugs work better when combined with diet and exercise - as a matter of fact, almost 20% better. This is an astonishing fact when combined with the fact that men in the UK are only 50% likely to continue taking a cholesterol drug 90 days after its been prescribed. Scaled Insights' technology uses AI to create a personality profile of the patient and then provide their doctor with the appropriate nudge to influence that specific patient's personality to comply with a full treatment regime, longterm.
Wales | Artificial Intelligence
Selligence uses proprietary artificial intelligence to predict the expansion, business transformation and commercial activity of companies months before anyone else, enabling customers to identify high-growth targets and automate their sales and marketing efforts at scale.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence
Spot Ship is an enterprise SaaS company that reduces the time it takes a ship broker to optimise ship selection for a commodity cargo from 6 person-days to 2 person-hours. The company makes use of next generation computer vision and machine learning algorithms to channel position list data into a robust cloud SQL database. Brokers are able to query this database through a simple web-based user interface on any device. While the platform allows our clients to save time, reduce costs and increase revenue (via beating slower brokers to a competitive fixture), widespread use will also reduce CO2 emissions from shipping by 90Mt annually, approximately 20% of the UK’s current level of pollution across all sectors.
London | Artificial Intelligence | @untritecom
The Untrite AI platform mines and makes sense of unstructured data, collating it together to give a whole picture for an actionable solution. The platform addresses the fact that data and knowledge can be overwhelming, and company know-how is locked in most experienced people’s minds and in dispersed silos, hidden in a free text. Untrite applies state-of-the-art AI technology empowering teams to use that data to increase transparency of client's business transactions, improve first time customer query resolution, assess and mitigate risk, optimise service performance and drive exceptional client experience. By taking advantage of the latest developments in AI (specifically natural language processing), Untrite has built the next evolution of enterprise search - Untrite AI engine. The platform connects to your systems via API or custom built links and then pulls all relevant information to the task, in real time. It translates your service organisation’s tribal knowledge into prescriptive business intelligence.
London | Artificial Intelligence
Vektor AI is a career development platform with the mission to help people grow in their careers through mentorship and community. Career development is one of the core factors affecting attrition and overall employee happiness at their jobs, at the same time it is fundamentally broken. People are not staying at one company or even in one career for years anymore, and they are building their careers, professional networks and relationship with a manager in a significantly different way than even 10 years ago.
Wales | Artificial Intelligence | @WyserAI
Wyser won an InnovateUK grant to build a prototype and work with several Ombudsman. Wyser has a suite of AI enabled services which optimise the collection/assessment of enquiry, claim, and dispute data, (collectively known as ‘cases’), for private and public sector organisations. The solutions minimise case assessment costs and maximise the number of cases that an organisation can concurrently manage, helping clients optimise their work in progress, improve the efficiency of downstream services and reduce costs to serve. The service is especially beneficial for high volume and/or low value case types e.g. claims, disputes etc. For example, for law firms, Wyser reduces labour intensive / high-cost customer onboarding processes such as merit/risk/commercial viability assessments. Costs are therefore only incurred for cases the organisation wishes to progress.
East of England | Artificial Intelligence | @xapien_ai
Xapien is an AI-powered, online research platform that produces background profiles on companies and individuals in minutes. It is used by organisations to understand who they are doing business with, comply with regulations and protect their reputation. It is as easy to use as Google, requires no training and can be run anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. The depth and quality of reporting has historically only been possible using expensive and time-consuming human investigation. Xapien uses the very latest artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies combined with proprietary methodologies and algorithms to provide fast and cost-effective due diligence on demand. Xapien combines international corporate records, sanctions and other watchlists, web and media content in over 100 languages to produce a comprehensive profile on any person or company in minutes.
South East | Artificial Intelligence
Zeta Motion is a deep tech company based in the UK, HK, and Vietnam. Offering Quality Control as a Service (QCaaS), Zeta Motion’s adaptive Automated Surface Inspection System (ASIS) allows manufacturers to transform their quality control with increased speed, accuracy, and scalability. Thanks to its patent-pending NEURAL CAPTURE™ AI pipeline, Zeta Motion can onboard large quantities of product variations rapidly and cost-efficiently with very little human involvement. The solution has delivered measurable ROI to top manufacturers in the US and the UK by helping them to cut costs, reduce waste and increase throughput and product quality.
To be eligible, your company could focus on anything from mobility to manufacturing, from e-commerce to healthcare, but your product must solve an identified, real problem.
The eligibility criteria:
*No agencies or consultancies
11 compact insight sessions over 6 months delivered by later-stage founders, all focused on key scaling challenges.
Meetups and dinners to better get to know your peers and connect you to relevant guests across VC, corporates and more
6 coaching sessions intimate Founder Circles with a startup coach to develop your leadership skills and peer connections
Intimate networking sessions full of support from like-minded peers, covering AI-specific scaling topics and insight.
“AI-first companies face some unique challenges, from engaging in trust and ethics to business models that are synonymous to that seen in a hybrid between consulting and software. Tech Nation’s Applied AI programme gave us a platform to discuss these common challenges and share solutions. The exposure to experts, coaches and mentors throughout the programme was incredibly helpful and provided a real opportunity to build valuable networks.”
Dev Amratia, Co-Founder and CEO at nPlan
““Businesses built on AI are always challenging and have the potential for real disruption. However, you need a very special environment to foster the right combination of technical, scientific, and entrepreneurial talents. That’s why the personal guidance and experience on offer through initiatives like Tech Nation’s Applied AI programme are so valuable to founders. I’m looking forward to reviewing the entries for this year’s cohort and wish all applicants every success.“
Iggy Bassi, Founder and CEO, Cervest
Known as the ‘rebels of accountancy’, Cooper Parry works with entrepreneurial, fast growth businesses across the UK to help them grow, become more tax efficient, get up to speed with their tech and transform their culture.
Scroll through to see the calibre of our expert advisors
George Mensah
Principal, Sure Valley Ventures
Angie Ma
Co-founder, Faculty
Mike Short CBE
Chief Scientific Advisor, DIT
Didem Un Ates
Head of Applied Strategy, Data & AI, CDO Office, Microsoft
Alex Perrin
Head of Ventures, XTX Markets
Maya Pindeus
Co-Founder, CEO Humanising Autonomy
Nathan Benaich
Founder & General Partner, Air Street Capital
Mike Dimelow
COO, Bloc Ventures
Lopa Patel
ChairDiversity UK
Andrew O’Neill
Principal, Act Venture Capital
Bethany Ayers
COO, Peak
Saagar Bhavsar
Venture Capital Investor, Begin Capital
Adam Shepherd
Investment Partner & COO, TempoCap
Blake Bower
Director of Digital and Technology Policy DCMS
Nigel Winship
Co-founder, People Matter
Maria Axente
Responsible AI & AI for Good LeadPwC UK
Oliver Cummings
CEO Nurole
Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Director, Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour, The University of Edinburgh
Megan Reynolds
Investor, Crane Venture Partners
Simon Greenman
Co-founder & Partner,
Best Practice AI
Orsola De Marco
Head of Product and Innovation, The ODI Org
Deepak Paramanand
Director of Artificial IntelligenceJPMorgan Chase & Co.
Peter Carway
Investment Director, Praetura Ventures
Ed Stacey
Managing Partner, IQ Capital
Manuel Antunes
VC Investor, Triple Point
Nadine Torbey
VC Investor, AlbionVC
Luke Smith
Investment Partner, Forward Partners
Tobias Rijen
Co-founder & CTO, Kheiron Medical
Volker Hirsch
Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners
Tom Gray
Group CTO and Director of Innovation, Kainos
Vanessa Viana
Global Managing Partner, Capital Lab Ventures
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