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.
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.
Tech Nation’s Applied AI 3.0 growth programme is back and it’s bigger than ever. This year’s cohort includes 32 innovative companies which are creating real-world impact by transforming ways of working in various sectors such as Healthcare, Law, Agritech and more. Read more about Applied AI 3.0.
Artificial Intelligence | @VivoAi
AI VIVO combines systems biology and machine learning/AI, to create an entirely new drug discovery paradigm. By looking beyond single molecular targets, AI VIVO considers the whole cell and provides a new platform to understand cellular dynamical behaviour. The AI VIVO proprietary prediction engine is optimised to predict interventions that change cellular behaviour from dysfunctional behaviours (disease) towards normal behaviours (healthy) significantly faster, cheaper and more accurately.
Artificial Intelligence | @ainostics
AINOSTICS is an award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) enabled analytics and diagnostics company, commercialising over two decades of world-leading research into the diagnosis of various neurological conditions, such as dementia, multiple sclerosis (MS), stroke, brain tumours, traumatic brain injury (TBI) by the company's founding team and globally renowned scientific advisors. The solutions represent breakthroughs that can provide affordable, automated, extensible and personalised healthcare platforms for assisting the clinical diagnosis of various hard-to-diagnose tissue modifying neuropathologies. AINOSTICS aims to become the global leader in the provision of solutions for remote monitoring and clinical assessment in such conditions.
Artificial Intelligence
Akrivia Health is a data-driven discovery company, specialising in real-world data on mental health and dementia disorders. Powered through artificial intelligence and robust governance, the company brings together engineers, researchers, clinicians, patients and industry to build massive multi-dimensional datasets and powerful analytic tools to accelerate the development of new treatments and service improvements in mental health and dementia.
Artificial Intelligence | @AnalyticsEng
Analytics Engines enables organisations to easily and quickly adopt data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence as a core part of their business and accelerate conversion of data into valuable business insights and outcomes. To better enable this, the company has developed an innovative insight and discovery platform MINERVA which seeks to solve a key challenge of understanding complex interrelationships between datasets and surfacing previously unseen (or obfuscated) connections within this data. MINERVA enables users to enhance, query, search and explore their data to find hidden patterns and relationships between individuals, organisations, places and documents to better understand risk, find opportunities, or locate anomalies.
Artificial Intelligence | @justaskporter
Managing places and real assets is time-consuming, high-risk and human resource intensive. askporter was founded out of the belief that human time is precious. The askporter platform enables people to interact with their real-world environment effortlessly by helping organisations manage their customers, places and real assets autonomously with AI.
Artificial Intelligence | @conigital
Conigital is a driverless vehicle & intelligent mobility-as -a-service company offering on demand-driven and (retrofitted) driverless vehicles. Conigital offers a turnkey, automated and optimised integration of CAVs into a local transport system. Utilising AI and machine learning techniques, Conigital’s integrated solution improves asset management, customer experience and operational efficiency. This means increased safety, higher efficiency and a reduction in wasted time and a significant step towards on-demand MaaS (Mobility as a Service) and FaaS (Freight as a Service) solutions.
Artificial Intelligence | @deepplanet3
Deep Planet, a startup from Oxford University, helps winemakers and growers build resiliency against the effects of climate change. Deep Planet’s VineSignal is a SaaS-based AI platform using satellite imagery and IoT sensor data, to help growers decide where and when to harvest. Deep Planet helps to monitor maturity and predict optimal harvest dates and identify areas of quality to meet the needs of higher value wines. Features include vineyard health monitoring, highly accurate hands-off weekly yield prediction, enhanced irrigation capability, early disease detection, and soil carbon monitoring.
Artificial Intelligence | @dragonflyai_co
Dragonfly AI is a predictive analytics platform designed to help creative, marketing and insights teams improve the effectiveness of content and experiences across any channel. Dragonfly AI uses cutting-edge neuroscience to accurately and instantly show what grabs audiences' attention first across any content. Using an algorithm based on a decade of scientific research, Dragonfly AI simulates how attention works in the brain to show instantly what an audience sees first.
For autonomous vehicles (AVs) to become a commercial reality, AV developers are starting to realize that they must learn to handle huge numbers of edge cases -- the countless high-risk scenarios which are individually unlikely, but together make up the bulk of the risk. dRISK is solving this problem with a full-stack technology suite for training and testing AVs on the most diverse collection of edge cases. This product, the first true driver’s test for self-driving cars, is funded by a major grant from the UK’s Department of Transport.
Artificial Intelligence
Dyad is building an AI-powered knowledge graph that enhances and accelerates the adoption of value-based care. Upon this foundation, they develop applications that help healthcare providers optimise their workflows and maximise income under pay-for-performance schemes, while payers are able to optimise risk adjustment, revenue cycle management, master member indexing, and more.
The e-Pharmacy API platform works with third-party companies to offer more people access to prescription medication and on-demand pharmacist support. A patient simply needs to go on a website, choose the medication they need, fill in a simple health questionnaire and pay for their item. The service empowers patients to take control of their health in a safe and regulated way and, ultimately, reduce the burden of illness on the wider healthcare system.
Artificial Intelligence
Salesforce doesn’t work for retail sales. eebz is a data-first approach to help brands increase their sales at retail. eebz sources data from retailers’ websites and API’s and then uses AI to make recommendations to the teams who sell to these retailers.
Artificial Intelligence | @etiqai
Etiq is developing a software solution that enables businesses to identify and mitigate biases, which are inherent within all automated decision-making systems. Founded in 2019 (London, UK), Etiq’s product comprises algorithms that assess how robust the models employed by their business clients are, based on a deep understanding of the factors which constitute best practice definitions of fairness and accuracy in AI solutions. Etiq’s analysis, testing and modelling process is then able to provide uniquely innovative solutions to mitigate the biases identified, resulting in greater market opportunities, and decreased compliance and reputational risk for their clients.
Artificial Intelligence | @futureanthem
Future Anthem is the market leader in Game Data Science. The company uses machine learning to provide actionable intelligence to help their customers grow responsibly with measurable improvements that enhance the player experience for everyone. Future Anthem’s AI solutions personalise and protect the player experience in real-time. The company also helps operators and games studios apply data to product design decisions and optimise performance. Future Anthem calls this Game Data Science.
Artificial Intelligence | @intellin_
Gendius’ mission is to be the World’s leading solution provider at preventing and managing the complications of Chronic Disease through the use of AI. Gendius has developed algorithms from 10 year longitudinal data sets that enable earlier identification of an individual’s risk of developing complications and earlier intervention by the healthcare team and patient. The team at Gendius have developed an award winning platform, Intellin(R), to deliver algorithms directly to the healthcare team and patient.
Artificial Intelligence | @headlightai
Headlight AI’s vision is to be the leading company globally in the development and deployment of smart digitalisation and assessment tools for critical infrastructure across Utilities, Transport, and Construction. Headlight AI’s mission is to help organisations digitise and assess their critical infrastructure, across the most extreme environments, in all weather conditions, any time of day, above and below ground. The company has started with underground environments, and integrated sensors and electronics with its proprietary software to enable robots to operate where it is unsafe or challenging for humans, thereby improving health and safety during data collection, and providing a scalable solution with enhanced survey information for infrastructure inspection and maintenance. This can ensure projects run on time, on budget, all whilst reducing carbon emissions.
Humanloop is a low-code platform to rapidly build state-of-the art natural language AI models and immediately deploy them. Using Humanloop, software teams can do in hours what previously took weeks and save tens of thousands in annotations costs and data science expertise.
Artificial Intelligence | @hyperstrategy
Hyper uses AI and data science to help retailers and brands understand the deep relationships between their customers and products, and enables them to use this insight to make more profitable, customer-led decisions about product range, pricing and personalisation. This is done via a SaaS platform which combines AI & data science, business intelligence and decision intelligence. Hyper gives non-technical people the ability to uncover powerful insights and make better decisions via a highly intuitive, visual user interface, reducing the need to recruit expensive and hard-to-find data scientists.
Artificial Intelligence | @iamYiam
iamYiam is an award-winning, personalised digital platform focused on preventing physical and mental health problems. Given a global healthcare cost of $8 trillion, of which $6.1 trillion is purely linked to preventable or manageable diseases, the company aims to empower people to manage or prevent diseases and mental illnesses such as stress, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, back-pain, hypertension and depression. Combining big health data, artificial intelligence and genetic and academic research covering more than 2.5 million clinical trial subjects, iamYiam delivers a personalised, performance-focused health plan facilitated by sydTM, a personalised AI companion. Alongside this, the iamYiam LifeQuality Index measures impact in preventive health using data insights to deliver a personalised-health recommender-engine and population-insight health dashboard for outcomes-based health planning.
Artificial Intelligence | @KYMIRAsport
KYMIRA is an innovator in the smart wearable textiles industry. It combines AI with cutting-edge electronic-textiles - both of which are developed internally - to provide game-changing healthcare solutions. KYMIRA's garments aim to improve patient outcomes and reduce the burden on healthcare providers.
Artificial Intelligence | @LiberEatApp
LiberEat makes food safer and easier for people with dietary restrictions including veganism, vegetarianism, allergies & intolerances. Its unique AI-based technology can identify mistakes in food data from suppliers and its allergen safety technology also significantly outperforms methods used by even the largest food businesses to check the accuracy of allergen information in food labels, menus and supplier data. The consumer app helps users by providing bespoke menus, supermarket grocery options, and recipes, with options filtered by their dietary requirements and their family's requirements. The app also helps businesses such as restaurant chains, supermarkets and food producers by making them more accessible to a large rapidly growing customer group and providing unique, industry leading analytics and insights.
Artificial Intelligence | @micrographiaBio
Micrographia Bio is a next-generation life sciences business which applies machine learning to microscopy to lower barriers to drug discovery. Micrographia turns drug discovery on its head; instead of asking the question 'which of these millions of molecules cures this specific disease?' it asks the question: 'for this molecule, which disease is it best suited to cure?'
Artificial Intelligence | @OilXs
OilX counts the world's oil, one barrel at a time with one bold target: zero missing barrels. OilX enables traders and analysts to gain intelligence that is facts-based and helps them to draw conclusions faster via intuitive and accurate real-time oil data analytics and market intelligence reports that facilitate confident decision-making. With OilX, traders and analysts get a comprehensive view of the global oil markets enabling them to spend more time trading rather than analysing, and make better, faster, data-driven decisions as a result.
Artificial Intelligence
Modern greenhouses are critical to the future of agriculture but the industry cannot scale to meet demand due to the reliance on highly-skilled growers. Optimal's autonomous growing system overcomes this final barrier to scale, enabling the rapid global transition towards greenhouse agriculture. By 2030, Optimal will be a technology-enabled operator of 60 greenhouses with revenue of $3bn.
Artificial Intelligence | @@PharmEnable
PharmEnable is an AI drug discovery company unlocking challenging targets by mapping unexplored chemical space. It reproduces the specificity of biologics in the powerful form of a small molecule. The company is passionate about making a difference to patients through developing life-changing drugs.
Artificial Intelligence | @@RobinAI_UK
Robin AI is a legal tech company which uses machine learning and other software to automatically review and amend legal contracts. A 'human-in-the-loop' approach uses a combination of AI and expert human reviewers to ensure that documents are processed with the quality of a lawyer but faster and at a fraction of the cost. The company has focused on the private equity and M&A industry where the processing of high-volume and routine but important documents is a real pain point in the deal-making process.
Artificial Intelligence
Sparkbox is a cloud application that helps retailers sell more inventory, more profitably by optimising their pricing and merchandising decisions. It pairs machine learning and predictive analytics with a simple planning application to help busy retail teams leverage their data, understand the impact of their decisions, and maximise the value of their inventory. Sparkbox is relevant for ecommerce and physical retail - in a most recent trial the company onboarded a £800m retailer in 34 days and improved their sale profit by more than 50%.
Artificial Intelligence | @@ToffeeAm
TOffeeAM software optimises engineering component designs to achieve the highest possible performance. The company specialises in fluid structure topology optimisation, with applications in heat exchanges, robust optimisation and valves. The complex designs produced can be manufactured using additive manufacturing.
TurinTech is a leader in evolutionary AI optimisation. Its vision is to empower businesses to scale AI efficiently by automating the whole data science lifecycle with multi-objective optimisation. It aims to drive enterprise AI transformation with minimum human effort, at large scale, high speed and low cost.
Versed AI uses natural language processing to map companies' multi-tiered supply chains by processing vast quantities of publicly available text documents. Understanding extended supply chains is important for managing disruption risk, reputational risk, and compliance risk such as the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Waymark Tech develops and supplies regulatory intelligence solutions for organisations operating in highly regulated industries. The cost of complying with regulations continues to increase and represents a growing burden on businesses; compliance practitioners identify their biggest challenge to be managing and coping with regulatory change. The platform is an award-winning, natural language processing solution that helps compliance teams drastically reduce their current manual processes, improve oversight and provide transparency.
Biologically, women are not the same as men - but the medical research world fails to accommodate this. 80% of the medical research is still done exclusively on male mice. WILD.AI's extensive research on women's health is translated into an app, serving women from menstruation to menopause.
“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
Lola 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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