Top 10 AI Companies to Watch in the UK

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The world of artificial intelligence has grown to impressive heights in recent years, with one study showing that the amount of enterprises integrating AI has risen 270% in just the last four years.

With such a boom in the AI sector, many impressive start-ups have emerged with products helping to innovate a variety of areas across a range of different industries. Whether its detecting fake news or the risk of certain cancers, AI technologies are being developed to help with a wide scope of different issues.

This piece explores TechRound’s lists its top 10 AI companies to watch in both the UK and abroad, all of which have designed technologies to assist with a range of different issues.

 

Number 1. Optalitix

 

 

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Optalitix Co-Founders, Jon Shapiro (left) and Dani Katz (right)

 

Founded in 2013, Optalitix consists of a team of specialised actuaries, technologists and data scientists developing software tools with integrated AI and machine learning to help businesses see real, measurable advantages across key business metrics, no matter the business.

Optalitix is one of the London AI companies included in this list, located in the heart of Camden. It was founded by ex-South Africans Jonathan Shapiro and Dani Katz, the Camden based team have served a number of clients in finance and insurance, including Vitality, Go Compare and United Trust Bank.

Their technology can be applied to any type of business and can help in improving business performance by understanding customers better, retaining them, and increasing conversion. The company have built a SaaS product called Acumen. Acumen takes any AI model, including models built in Python, R and even Excel and makes them accessible by API. Get in touch with Optalitix.

 

Number 2. Relative Insights

 

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Initially founded as a way of helping to detect criminals who were pretending to be children online, Relative Insights helps to identify the variances in how different audiences talk. Their platform can analyse data from any given language, comparing it against other audiences and helping to provide a business with insights on consumers.

These insights can enable businesses to develop improved content and thereby improved communication with their users, which can help with sales and overall productivity within the business.

 

Number 3. Phrasee

 

 

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Phrasee Founders – Neil Yager (left), Parry Malm (middle) and Victoria Peppiatt (right)

 

Co-founded by Neil Yager, Parry Malm and Victoria Peppiatt, Phrasee helps businesses to generate optimised online content, designed specifically to attract their target audience. Phrasee achieved this by its Natural Language Generation system, which has integrated Deep Learning Technology to help the programme create optimised content; whether that’s in the form of Facebook advertisement, email headings, or push notifications. This helps a business to boost their online visibility, directing more traffic to their websites.

 

Number 4. C the Signs

 

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Dr Bhavagaya Bakshi and Dr Miles Payling, C the Signs
Dr Bhavagaya Bakshi and Dr Miles Payling, C the Signs

 

Founded by Dr Bhavagaya Bakshi and Dr Miles Payling, C the Signs was inspired by their experiences working together as junior doctors, witnessing first-hand how late detection of cancer can impact upon patients. C the Signs is a multi-device platform that uses AI and big data to help in early identification of patients who are at risk of cancer. The system, hosted in the cloud, can be delivered to not only app infrastructure, but also to web platforms.

The service was initially launched across three health authorities, which covered 1 million patients in total. The team at C the Signs have recently started to get the results back from this trial, which have shown to improve the detection of cancer across the NHS England average by tenfold.

 

Number 5. Factmata

 

 

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Founded in 2017, Factmata is another one of the London AI companies on this list, aiming to reduce the spread of false information and abusive content online. It does this through the development of unique algorithms, helping its users to identify and categorise content. Factmata have developed the following products:

 

  • Intelligence Reports
  • Factmata Moderation
  • Factmata API

 

Their Intelligence Reports product studies all content that surround a given topic, explores trends within that topic, and helps its clients to analyse the claims being made around this topic. Factmata Moderation helps clients to make sure they associate with safe platforms and networks that have valid, trustworthy content. Factmata’s Blacklist also helps businesses to avoid using sites that publish fake news or abusive/hateful content.

Factmata API helps its clients to better analyse and understand online content, evaluating it on such categories as political bias and hate speech in order to provide the client with a better understanding as to the quality of the specified content.

 

Number 6. Humanising Autonomy

 

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Humanising Autonomy develop tools that help to improve the ways in which autonomous vehicles interact with people on the street. Founded by three graduates from Imperial University, Humanising Autonomy is a team of computer vision scientists and deep learning engineers. The company have developed a “pedestrian intent prediction platform” to help improve the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles within urban environments.

Autonomous vehicles are able to recognise signs that will suggest the particular behaviour or movement of a pedestrian, such as being distracted with their phones. Humanising Autonomy’s human intent prediction software helps an autonomous vehicle to understand the full spectrum of human behaviours, further helping them to navigate their way around cities safely. 

 

Number 7. People Matter

 

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Founded in 2018, People Matter develops wellness solutions to help both those struggling to improve their overall wellbeing, and function at their best possible selves. The company uses AI and machine learning technologies in addition to leading psychological research to bring its customers their specialised product – Okina.

Okina is an online platform that helps people to measure, analyse and understand their feelings, what issues in their lives are preventing their wellness, and get advice on how to improve and maintain wellbeing.

 

Number 8. Greyparrot

 

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Mikela Druckman, Nikola Sivacki, and Marco Paladini, Greyparrot
Grey Parrot Founders: Mikela Druckman, Nikola Sivacki, and Marco Paladini, Greyparrot

 

This impressive AI business is made up from a team of experts in computer vision and deep learning. Co-founded by Mikela Druckman, Nikola Sivacki, and Marco Paladini, Greyparrot helps to provide AI-based solutions for technologies involved in waste management. Greyparrot’s software can help to identify and categorise waste products, which can help to make the process of recycling more automated.

 

Number 9. Daisy Intelligence

 

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Daisy Intelligence is an award-winning technology firm that provides solutions to businesses on an AI-powered platform. Behind the technology for Daisy Intelligence is a team of over 50 specialists in computational science, business domains and mathematics. Daisy can provide both retail and insurance solutions, helping a company to not only analyse all transaction information to help with promotion and pricing, but also to identify fraud and to improve the underwriting process.

 

Number 10. CrowdStrike

 

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George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch
CrowdStrike Founders: George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch

 

CrowdStrike was created to protect businesses from sophisticated attacks that were able to penetrate through their malware defence systems. For their technology, co-founders of CrowdStrike George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch decided to create a new architecture entirely, this being cloud based. Their product provides endpoint protection and advanced intelligence to help target not only the malware, but also those who are carrying out the attacks.

This August, the company was made a leader in endpoint protection by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. CrowdStrike is continuing to release new developments to help in the protection against security breaches, including its most recent creation, CrowdScore, helping businesses to understand “the true state” of threats to their security.

 

Are There Many AI Companies (UK)?

 

There are a number of AI companies in London and the UK that are emerging, often bringing in talent from overseas including America, Eastern Europe, Asia and South Africa.

Whilst there many only be a few hundred AI companies, the industry is growing with more and more recruiters looking to fill in-house positions and jobs that overlap with data science and data analytics. There are more and more AI businesses on the horizon that are starting up and even large companies such as Samsung, Apple and Microsoft have started building up their own AI teams.

The most popular hubs for AI around London are Camden and Old Street (Shoreditch).

 

What Is AI and How Does It Work?

 

Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is essentially a branch of computer science involved in creating technologies that have, until now, required human intelligence. It enables computers to think and further act in “human-like” ways, which can take various different forms within the world of tech, including all of those mentioned above.

Artificial Intelligence was a term first used in 1956 by computer scientist John McCarthy. Throughout the 1960s, scientists then started teaching computers to imitate human-like decision-making in what was the beginnings of ‘machine learning’. This has led us to the present day, where research is enabling machines to learn, and better understand the environment that surrounds them, further making their responses based on this understanding.

AI has become an integral part of our lives, not only in a personal sense with the way we spend our spare time, but also in our professional lives. As such technologies advance, AI becomes more and more integrated into our day-to-day activities, helping us to operate various different facets of our lives more efficiently and productively than ever before.

Many may not even realise the extent to which AI is involved in their daily activities. Many different services have incorporated such technologies to help improve their business, this can include more leisurely elements of your life, including the way in which Netflix offers you TV shows and films you may like, as well as improving the gameplay of video games.

As exemplified in our top 10 list above, AI can also be used for more business-related purposes – the types of AI companies uk businesses utilise can protect their valuable data, as well as accelerating the efficiency of various other operations within a business.

 

What Can AI Do for My Business?

 

Artificial intelligence has a variety of different applications in business. Through the help of AI companies uk businesses can take large amounts of data and create models that lead to ‘predictive behaviour’, meaning processes can run more effectively. This can be used for machinery, production, deliveries, giving quotes online, assessing risk, changing the prices of products and more.

Insurance – AI technologies can be used in various different areas of the insurance industry, helping to improve fraud detection, better analyse risk, and further customer experience.

Insurance companies can use AI to optimise efficiency and productivity, enabling them to automate many of the  time-consuming back-end tasks, whilst providing customers with personalised policies at a faster, more accurate rate.

Banking – AI is also used throughout the banking industry, helping to improve customer experience and keep up with regulatory compliance. Some banks now offer AI chatbots on their site, which help resolve customer queries/issues at any time of the day. This helps to boost customer experience by increasing accessibility.

AI technologies are also helping to improve regulatory compliance within the sector, many banks now looking for AI assistants to help monitor customer behaviour and transactions, whilst logging information for regulatory/compliance systems.

eCommerce – businesses involved in eCommerce can use AI to better understand how people buy and transact, analysing large amounts of user data to identify patterns in what certain types of customers like/dislike.

By using AI in eCommerce, businesses can gain a better understanding of their users’ data, whilst also being able to generate automatic suggestions from this analysis. One great example of this is Amazon, who generate a list underneath a particular product titled “customers who viewed this product also viewed”. Another example is Netflix, who offer suggestions on what people watch next after a particular show.

AI has helped to improve the efficiency and further the productivity of numerous different businesses. Whilst many have been concerned that this technology could replace people in their jobs, a lot of AI is actually being used not to replace, but rather to support a business’s workforce. AI is being used to free up employees’ time by automating various different time-consuming tasks, whilst others use it to gain insightful data on their business’s performance, and how to better understand their customers.

 

What Are the Best AI Companies UK Businesses Are Using?

 

Through our top 1o list includes a selection with some of the best AI companies uk businesses, and further businesses around the globe, are using. Such AI companies are helping businesses to make their operations more efficient, more secure, and more productive in certain areas than ever before.

Phrasee, for example is helping businesses to create content optimised to attract target audiences, thereby helping to improve the efficiently of which content reaches such audiences, and thereby gaining more traction within this commercialised demographic.

Elsewhere, such AI companies including  UK-based Optalitix are helping to enhance their clients’ operations by enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, including ways in which to increase conversion rates whilst retaining the existing customer base.

 

What Are the Top London AI Companies to Watch?

 

Through our top 10 list, we’ve explored some of the most exciting AI companies currently worth watching both throughout the UK and abroad. This has included such fantastic London AI companies as Factmata, Optalitix and Humanising Autonomy.

With the world of tech inherently ever-changing, innovating and evolving on the daily, who knows what these companies, or others emerging from the capital, will bring to the future of Artificial Intelligence, and furthermore the industries its technologies are applied to.