Imperial Innovations Group Regulatory News (IVO)

RNS Reach

22 October 2015

Imperial Innovations Group plc

Innovations leads £1.5m seed funding into an AI pioneer that interprets the Web and speeds up knowledge discovery

Imperial Innovations Group plc (AIM: IVO, 'the Group', 'Innovations') has led a £1.5 million seed funding into Telectic, a London-based start-up that uses artificial intelligence ("AI") to interpret the content of the World Wide Web. Innovations has committed £1.3 million to the round alongside angel investors and now holds an 18.3% stake in the Company.

The underlying technology has been developed over the last five years by a research team led by AI veteran Dr. Jason Kingdon. In addition to co-founding UCL's Intelligent Systems Lab, Jason Kingdon was the Co-founder and CEO of big data AI analytics pioneer Searchspace (now part of Nice Systems), and backer of Robotic Process Automation software company Blue Prism.

Kingdon founded Telectic alongside three other experienced AI and software entrepreneurs, Sergi Martorell, Dr. Iain McLaren and Pedro Esteban. Martorell formerly worked at Reuters, 3i, TTP Group and more recently at an artificial intelligence data company, whilst co-founder and CTO, McLaren, was the former Chief Architect of Searchspace. Pedro Esteban is an experienced Web applications developer.

The initial objective is to map and discover insights about the professional world by reorganising the Web's information about people, networks and organisations. The Company's AI technology offers an ability to build insights into professional networks from simply reading Web content, which will be valuable to professionals doing research and business development.

Jason Kingdon, Co-founder of Telectic, commented:

"It has always been an ambition of AI to develop tools that can help deliver insights and speed up the knowledge discovery process. Telectic is the first of this kind of technology to emerge and we are applying it to the whole Web.

"It means that important changes in the private markets, emerging technologies and professional clusters can be visualised and tracked. This dynamic real-time interpretation from the Web will add a new dimension to the $80bn business information market."

Jon Edington, Director Technology Ventures at Imperial Innovations, said:

"The UK is emerging as a centre for AI innovation. Telectic brings big data analytics and advances in AI into a compelling new capability and we believe this marks the start of AI accelerating human insights and knowledge."

Sergi Martorell, Co-founder of Telectic, added:

"We are delighted with the enthusiastic support that Innovations has provided for our business. The prototype product has mapped the UK and US markets and has referenced well with early test customers. We look forward to accelerating this progress with a view to market launch in 2016."

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Notes to editors

About Imperial Innovations - www.imperialinnovations.co.uk 

Imperial Innovations Group plc ("Innovations") creates, builds and invests in pioneering technology companies and licensing opportunities developed from outstanding scientific research from the 'Golden Triangle', the geographical region broadly bounded by London, Cambridge and Oxford. This area has an unrivalled cluster of outstanding academic research and technology businesses, and is home to four of the world's top 10 universities, as well as leading research institutions, the cream of the UK's science and technology businesses and many of its leading investors.

Innovations supports scientists and entrepreneurs in the commercialisation of their ideas, through the licensing of intellectual property, by leading the formation of new companies, by recruiting high-calibre management teams and by providing investment and encouraging co-investment. Innovations remains an active investor over the life of its portfolio companies, with the majority of Innovations' investment going into businesses in which it is already a shareholder.

Since becoming a public company in 2006, Innovations has raised more than £346.0 million of equity from investors, which has enabled it to invest in some of the most exciting spin-outs to come out of UK academic research. In addition, the Group has agreed £80.0 million in loan facilities from the European Investment Bank (EIB).

Between Innovations' admission to AIM (August 2006) and 31 July 2015, Innovations has invested a total of £236.8 million across its portfolio companies, which have raised collectively investment of £1.3 billion.

About Telectic - www.telectic.io

Telectic is the first platform with live interpretation of the Web's content on decision makers, their networks and organisations. It uses artificial intelligence technology to interpret the Web around real-world entities, their attributes and connections. By automatically adding a semantic layer to the Web, the product finds and interprets content from multiple sources, automatically curates the important facts and monitors the changes that impact the tracked entities. The mission is to interpret the Web's content to support professional decision making.