40 innovative AI startups to watch

UK startups are leading the stride in the AI revolution. We spotlight the ones to keep your eye on.

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Artificial intelligence has become the new entrepreneurial frontier to cross. From ChatGPT to Google’s Bard, a technological race has begun and innovative businesses everywhere are looking to break the latest AI product.

The UK is exceptionally well positioned to lead the AI charge, with a vibrant startups sector that is seizing the new possibilities that artificial intelligence offers.

As the UK government strides ahead to become a world leader in AI, UK startups have already received the memo, with numerous businesses at the forefront of AI innovation. In this article, we highlight the top 25 UK AI startups to keep on your radar.

The UK’s AI Innovation Whitepaper - What is it all about?

Earlier this month, the UK government published its AI whitepaper, laying out a roadmap to drive innovation in the sector. It proposes a regulatory model that, is hoped, will drive growth in the AI sector. It;s part of the UK’s national AI strategy, which over the next 10 years, seeks to position the UK as an AI global superpower.

Among other things, it proposes to:

  • Avoid heavy-handed legislation so that AI innovation is not stifled
  • Give responsibility to individual existing regulators as opposed to an overarching body, so AI can be developed in a context-specific manner for each industry
  • Promptly draft rules for the use of AI to become a leading voice in the international conversation
  • Nurture public trust in the use of AI

It’s hoped the plan will help unleash the benefits of AI, which already contributes £3.7 billion to the UK economy.

Top AI Companies in the UK to watch

To understand what the future of AI in the UK will look like, we’ve found the top 20 startups using the emerging technology in the most innovative, useful, and creative ways.They made this list due to their collection of funding successes, unique way of using AI, and overall inspiring business stories.

PolyAI

Founders: Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, Pei-Hao Su
Founded: 2017
Website: poly.ai

The impending pain of having to call customer service is something any customer can relate to. What’s more, with rising call centre costs and the push to divert customer support to online chats, it can be even worse to realise you can’t even make a phone call at all. This is where PolyAI steps in. Its artificial intelligence voice assistants have been designed so smoothly it’s hard to distinguish whether you’re talking to an AI or a human being. Contrary to other AI voice assistants, PolyAI’s technology is reactive rather than predictive, which means the technology actually listens and understands what you’re saying.

PolyAI recently secured $40m in a Series B funding round and is looking to increase its global expansion. Major UK brands including Metro Bank, Greene King, Whitbread and Starling Bank are already entrusting customer support calls to PolyAI’s technology. It also snatched up the seventh spot in the Startups 100 2023 Index.

Infogrid

Founders: William Cowell De Gruchy
Founded: 2018
Website: infogrid.io

If your eyes have watered at the sight of your latest office electricity bill or if you constantly grumble about how cold the air conditioner is, Infogrid offers a smart AI-powered solution. Through AI-controlled automations, Infogrid gets rid of the hassle of fine-tuning the conditions of your office and saves you having to hire external contractors. It aims to make every building healthy, efficient, and sustainable.

Infogrid recently raised $90 million in a Series B funding round and has won countless awards for its technology, including the Corporate Vision Technology Innovator Awards.

Humanising Autonomy

Founders: Maya Pindeus, Leslie Nooteboom and Raunaq Bose
Founded: 2017
Website: humanisingautonomy.com

Humanising Autonomy envisions a world in which AI technology is built around people and has a positive impact on humans and society. Whether it’s a vehicle, traffic control, a smart home device, or any other automated machine, AI helps machines to understand someone’s intentions from their movements or body language without infringing on ethical standards.

Humanising Autonomy’s focus on making AI human-centric has already helped it secure success. It recently raised $11m in a Series A funding round co-led by Beacon Capital LLP and Emellience Partners. To date, it has raised a grand total of $17.2m.

Intelistyle

Founders: Michael Michelis and Kostas Koukoravas
Founded: 2018
Website: intelistyle.com

As everyday as the task might seem, picking an outfit can be a daunting decision. Any ecommerce fashion website will be ripe with options, which, to a shopper, might feel overwhelming. Intelistyle offers a unique AI styling experience, saving you a personal stylist and the headache of visualising your potential outfits in your head.

Intelistyle uses AI to personalise shopping experiences for customers. Its tech is already used by major fashion retailers, including H&M, Tommy Hilfiger and D&G. The startup harnesses information about outfits customers already own to make recommendations on what they should buy next. Impressively, in London Fashion Week 2019, Intelistyle’s AI programming outperformed professional stylists, catching the attention of the likes of Forbes, and our own Startups 100 listings. It has received numerous accolades, including Best AI Product in Fashion in the CogX awards in 2021.

TeamSportz

Founders: Francisco Baptista
Founded: 2019
Website: teamsportz.pro

What if there was a way to improve your athletic skills on demand, regardless of what sport you play? With the TeamSportz app, that is possible. The platform enables clubs to run their teams more efficiently and gain access to elite performance stats with unique AI technology. Its features include the ability to track players’ goals and performance with intuitive dashboards and personalised statistics.

TeamSportz efforts to democratise access to sports technology have already bred success. It secured a paid partnership with London Sports and, to date, the startup has more than 2,000 active players using the platform. It has also raised funding from investors in the UK and the US, including sporting giant Strava’s founder, Mark Gainey.

KYC Hub

Founders: Farnoush Mirmoeini and Jay Rao
Founded: 2017
Website: kychub.com

KYC Hub is boosting business confidence by enabling firms to lower their risk of falling victim of financial fraud through the power of AI. Its technology focuses on reducing processing time when conducting due diligence procedures and enhanced checks on businesses or individuals. Its meticulous design has uncovered hidden risks that other due diligence processes may not. For clients, this results in a 40-80% reduction in operational costs.

KYC Hub’s impressive track record has already led it to being shortlisted for five categories in the RegTech Insights Award, competing against publicly listed companies and multinational corporations with thousands of employees. The company has customers from Singapore to the US, and is planning to empower organisations to prevent financial crime in even more locations.

Sprout.ai

Founders: Raphael Gouth and Niels Thoné
Founded: 2018
Website: sprout.ai

Submitting and processing an insurance claim is stuff that can come straight out of nightmares. Not only is it slow, but it requires navigating a dense sea of documents and unstructured data. This is where Sprout.ai guides the way as the lighthouse that both claimants and insurers were looking for.

Sprout’s AI software has been developed specifically for the insurance industry, and streamlines the entire process from claim to settlement. Processes that would previously take months can now be done in near real-time. Sprout has already been able to bring its cutting-edge technology to insurance giants like Zurich and MetLife, and has raised £8 million in Series A funding.

Genie AI

Founders: Nitish Mutha and Rafie Faruq
Founded: 2017
Website: genieai.co

If you’re not a lawyer (and sometimes, even if you are), it’s likely that the legal world feels complicated, obscure, and difficult to understand. Genie AI is trying to change that. The London-based startup seeks to make legal services available and affordable to everyone by providing open-source access to hundreds of legal business templates.

With Genie’s smart machine learning, anyone can review documents on the platform and proof clauses against thousands of past deals. What’s more, its technology enables firms to customise their documents based on relevant context, like sector, business size, jurisdiction, and contract type. The startup has garnered impressive success, with over 100 organisations signing up to Genie AI every day and experiencing a 30-fold rate of growth in one year with zero marketing spend.

Clever Lili Ltd

Founders: Alex Hak and Petia Hak
Founded: 2019
Website: https://www.gcsehistory.com/

Scouring the internet for GCSE revision materials can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. The task becomes even more difficult for neuro-diverse students who struggle to find means of catching up with their peers. That’s why Clever Lili launched the app, designed to help students with ADD/ADHD, dyslexia and other neurodiverse conditions to approach revision with confidence.

The app is unique thanks to its karaoke function, which highlights text as the AI reads it aloud. The voice can be slowed down, sped up, or even turned off depending on the student’s or teacher’s preference. The AI app has already acquired considerable industry acceptance. In 2021, it became a finalist in the Education Resources Awards 2021. It has also received support from multiple UK exam boards including Edexcel, CIE, and AQA.

Mintago

Founder: Chieu Cao
Founded: 2017
Website: mintago.com

In the midst of a bleak economic winter, users are in need of a platform that can help them better manage their finances. Mintago identified this gap in the market and launched a platform fully focused on financial wellbeing, particularly for better managing pensions. It comes equipped with a whole host of features, including free IFA access, an interactive AI helper, and budgeting tools.

Mintago’s service is unique in that it isn’t biased towards any one pension provider. Employees can contribute to their pension with confidence, and decide whether to keep their pension pots separate or combine them for ease using the Mintago “pension hunter” tool. Employers are guided through the implementation of salary sacrifice pension in a hassle-free way. Mintago claims to have saved over £1 million for businesses and found over £10 million of missing pensions for employees. Recently, it won the Best Personal Budgeting Service Awards in the Fintech Breakthrough Awards.

Jiva.ai

Founders: Dr Manish Patel, Chetan Kaher, and Sarah D’Souza
Founded: 2019
Website: jiva.ai

Although AI is rapidly becoming more normalised, building artificial intelligence products is still a difficult task to tame. Developing an AI or AI-powered service can often be complex and expensive, making smaller businesses feel like adopting the technology is a pipe dream. Jiva.ai, however, is designed to make that pipe dream a reality.

This AI builder platform offers a scalable solution for companies of all sizes, helping entrepreneurs create their own AI function thanks to its approachable tools.

The platform has already found a major footing by offering solutions to the medical research industry. It has established partnerships with GE Healthcare, Roche Diagnostics, plus other NHS and academic institutions in the UK and globally.

Gigged.AI

Founders: Rich Wilson and Craig Short
Founded: 2021
Website: gigged.ai

Finding the right staff and contractors can be an arduous and time-consuming process. Gigged.AI wants to change this, by giving recruitment a true 21st century spin by using AI. The company’s AI-driven marketplace means it’s able to match companies with the most suitable candidates in just ten seconds, automating one of the most time-consuming tasks for managers.

Gigged.AI has also utilised the power of NFTs to design its GigChain platform. This offers freelancers a way to easily and securely verify their identity, work history, certifications and more. Despite its young company age, Gigged.AI already has 200 clients, including the BBC and Leidos and has received over 5,000 freelancer sign ups. Further attesting to its success, it was also awarded £100,000 through the SMART Scotland Grant.

Wayve

Founders: Alex Kendall and Amar Shah
Founded: 2017
Website: wayve.ai

Autonomous vehicles are no longer the stuff of science fiction, and in a market rushing to capitalise on this potential, Wayve is making…well, waves. The self-driving car startup is building end-to-end machine learning algorithms to make cars smarter than ever before. As opposed to “conventional” self-driving cars, Wayve builds a comprehensive data-driven system that doesn’t depend on a certain range of given “if-else” statements. This makes the vehicle safer in unfamiliar situations.

Wayve has secured $200 million in funding and has partnered with Microsoft. More recently, it launched a partnership with Asda to launch the UK’s largest self-driving grocery home delivery trial.

Stability AI

Founder: Emad Mostaque
Founded: 2021
Website: stability.ai

DreamStudio home page, product of Stability AI

Stability’s AI ethos is to democratise access to the technology to foster global creativity and innovation. With a network that surpasses 14,000 developers, Stability AI is backed by research communities that are creating the newest AI products – from imaging, to code, to audio, to 3D content.

Stability AI first launched Stable Diffusion in 2022, which is a pioneering text-to-image model. By adding a few prompts, such as “a Tibetan mastiff in the style of Gustav Klimpt”, you can see jaw-dropping image results in moments.

Stability AI has raised $101 million in funding and has made plenty of headlines as the text-to-image tool captivated users around the world.

Haiper

Founders: Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang
Founded: 2021
Website: haiper.ai

As generative AI continues to evolve, Haiper is jumping into the mix with a new 3D reality recreation technology. Haiper has launched two products so far – Captur3 and AIGC. The first lets you take 3D ‘pictures’ so you can capture your favourite moments and objects in its most life-like variation. The second takes the text-to-image AI technology one step further by making text-to-3D models a possibility.

Although Haiper is still in a nascent stage, it’s already raised $13.8 million in a seed round, so it’s definitely a project to keep your eyes peeled for.

Capture3, a Haiper product

Charm Therapeutics

Founders: Laksh Aithani and David Baker
Founded: 2021
Website: charmtx.com

The pandemic made us painfully aware of how crucial it is to be equipped with the latest cutting edge medical insights, so medical research can respond to new and existing diseases. Charm Therapeutics is an example of how AI technology can cross new medical frontiers. It uses AI 3D deep learning technology to deliver new medicines that can target cancers and other diseases with high unmet medical need.

So far, Charm Therapeutics has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round. It’s also backed by reputable investors like OrbiMed Healthcare Fund management, F Prime and Bristol Myers Squibb.

Mind Foundry

Founders: Stephen Roberts and Michael Osborne
Founded: 2016
Website: mindfoundry.ai

Getting involved with an emerging technology can be a solitary and confusing process. That’s what Mind Foundry wants to change, by helping AI grow in an ethical and transparent way. Mind Foundry develops AI solutions that help people and organisations to implement AI more responsibly, with features that promote knowledge-sharing and meaningful understanding of how the technology works.

The Mind Foundry platform has been used to solve some of the most challenging applications of machine learning and AI, from detecting fraud costing businesses millions of dollars to collaborative intelligence processing. Attesting to its success, the Mind Foundry secured $30m in funding from Aioi Nissay Dowa, Parkwalk Advisors and Oxford Science Enterprises.

Mosaic TX

Founders: Mathew Garnett, Adrian Ibrahim, Emile Voest
Founded: 2020
Website: mosaic-tx.com

Charm Therapeutics is not the only AI startup expanding the frontiers of medical technology. Mosaic TX is using AI to help develop oncology therapeutics, working towards making cancer treatments safer and more effective. Currently, it’s incredibly time consuming and costly to test all potential drug, target and therapeutic hypotheses.

Through machine learning and statistical methods, Mosaic TX wants to make the discovery of new cancer drugs and treatments a quicker process.

Mosaic TX recently closed $28 million in a Series A funding round and is backed by investors like Syncona, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Innovate UK.

Salience Labs

Founders: Vaysh Kewada and Dr. Johannes Feldmann
Founded: 2021
Website: saliencelabs.ai

To seize the AI revolution, developers will need to have new, shiny and powerful hardware. That’s where Salience Labs comes in. Staffed by a full team of physicists, coders and engineers, Salience Labs is developing chips that use light to execute operations. This boosts processing performance and accelerates exponential advances in AI.

The research is based on decades of research from the University of Oxford and Münster University in Germany. Salience Labs’s technological proposal has already inspired confidence amongst investors. It recently raised $11.5 million in seed funding and has partnered with Cambridge Innovation Capital, Deeptech Labs, and Oxford Investment Consultants.

Salience Labs chip prototype 

Solvo.ai

Founder: Gaurav Bajaj
Founded: 2021
Website: solvo.ai

When the war in Ukraine started and the cost-of-living crisis exploded, we were reminded of how fragile our supply chains can be. Solvo.ai wants to change that and make them more resilient than before. Using value-driven machine learning, Solvo.ai wants to simplify decision making, accelerate recovery and improve resilience in global supply chains. The idea is to help firms adapt to new conditions and recover from disruptions as quickly as possible.

The London-based AI has already proven to be of interest to investors, having recently raised £3.47 million in a seed round.

Vestico

Founders: Maia Sasania, Maddie Forman, Benedikt Hirmer
Founded: 2020
Website: vestico.co

Shopping for clothes, while exciting, can also be mercilessly frustrating. When you look at the picture of the model, you can never be sure if it will be a match for you. Vestico is trying to streamline that process and give you more confidence as a shopper.

Using AI technology, Vestico aims to be an all-in-content, sizing and personalisation platform for fashion and beauty eCommerce. The idea is to reduce returns and boost customer conversions.

The numbers already speak for themselves. Brands who use Vestico have seen an 11% increase in their conversions and a 17% decrease in returns. It also recently bagged £250k in venture capital investment from Jenson Funding Partners.

Apheris

Founders: Robin Röhm and Michael Höh
Founded: 2019
Website: apheris.com

Hundreds of companies are sitting on mountains of terabytes of data. However, hiking through that terrain without the right tools is tedious and complicated. Apheris offers the right compass to solve that problem. As a federated machine learning and analytics platform, it enables multiple organisations to extract value from each other’s decentralised data sets. This way, companies can overcome regulatory, technical, and commercial challenges, as well as make business decisions grounded in data.

Apheris secured $8.7m in seed funding in a round led by Octopus, LocalGlobe and the ex CFO of Google. It already works with the world’s biggest data owners and major enterprise customers. It has also worked to align quality control systems to reduce carbon emissions in a collaborative data ecosystem along the manufacturing value chain. In short, Apheris is capitalising on the value of sharing data

Edgify

Founders: Ofri Ben-Porat and Nadav Israel
Founded: 2015
Website: edgify.ai

Although self-checkout has become a staple of the retail industry, there’s still a margin of error that could lead to losses. Edgify has developed AI-based technology that can be implemented throughout supermarkets, in any scale or scanning device to help solve this issue. It can even distinguish between similar barcodeless fresh groceries, such as Granny Smith and Pink Lady apples. It then shares the acquired knowledge or model across a collaborative framework of POS machines, helping customers have quicker and faster check-outs.

Although the idea itself is not too complex, it has lots of value. Edgify has secured $6.5m in Seed funding via Octopus Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and a semiconductor giant. It was also part of the Startups 100 2019 Index.

Workfinder

Founders: Sherry Coutu CBE, Michaela Eschbach, Ketan Goyani, and Alice Müller
Founded: 2019
Website: workfinder.com

Companies value skills more than degrees from colleges or universities, but current HR platforms make it hard for companies to engage in skills-based hiring or career progression. That’s where Workfinder enters the picture. Using AI, it quickly filters employability, data, and business skills underpinning potential employees’ applications. Skillseeker AI is part of Workfinder’s technology which maps seven leading employer-led skills taxonomies to roles, courses, mentors and masterclasses. Its recommendation engine considers between 80 and 2,000 skills factors when conducting a candidate search for clients. With the skills gap currently hurting the labour market, a tool like Workfinder can make a real difference for HR teams.

Workfinders endeavour to help clients upskill, reskill and rebalance their workforce has already garnered success. It has worked with big clients like PayPal, Octopus Energy, and Expedia Group.

Greyparrot

Founders: Mikela Druckman
Founded: 2019
Website: greyparrot.ai

The mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is not enough to prevent massive landfills of wasteland from being a reality. That’s why Greyparrot has wielded the power of artificial intelligence to develop a waste analytics platform for the recycling industry and the circular economy. Through its waste recognition software, Greyparrot monitors and sorts out waste at scale to help boost recycling rates.

Its environmental mission has already garnered success. It won the National Recycling Awards in 2022. It also recently was announced as the latest winner of Amcor’s Lift-Off programme and will receive $500,000 investment and access to Amcor’s sustainability and packaging capabilities.

Conte.ai

Founders: Alex Bogins
Founded: 2020
Website: conte.ai

A car’s autopilot is a great solution to not having to be on edge all the time while you’re driving. Now imagine that, but for managing your social media. Conte.ai has designed a social media autopilot which conducts competitor analysis, prepares a strategy, writes texts, creates graphics and produces four weeks of ready-made posts all with AI. This means you can invest all that time into other more important and critical business tasks. Based on client testimonials and reviews, Conte.ai claims your business can get up to 10 times more social media followers and clients.

Conte.ai is already making big strides in the digital marketing space, having won Best Product for Digital Marketing in the SaaS awards and the Best Product for Digital Marketing at the DotComm Awards. It currently is at the Seed funding stage and has raised $2.4M in funding so far.

Rosa Biotech

Founders: Dr Mark Street-Docherty
Founded: 2019
Website: rosabio.tech

Combining the power of machine learning and protein design, Rosa Biotech wants to enable patients and clinicians to get early diagnoses of a broad spectrum of diseases. Born in the University of Bristol, Rosa Biotech has developed Pandra, an innovative sensing platform that can detect life-threatening disease with high accuracy from patient samples.

Its mission to empower patients with early diagnoses has already inspired trust from investors as Rosa Biotech recently secured £415,000 from angel investors. It also recently was awarded a grant by Innovate UK through its Biomedical Catalyst Feasibility & Primer Award.

Netacea

Founders: Andy Still and Jeremy Gidlow
Founded: 2018
Website: netacea.com

Protecting your business from cyberattacks will always be an item in your list of risks, given how technologically advanced they are increasingly becoming. Netacea is helping that list of risks feel less daunting. The company has created an AI platform that differentiates between bots and real humans through its machine-learning elements to ensure the system is constantly improving its recognition capabilities. Netacea helps to protect APIs, apps and websites for clients, giving a holistic cybersecure offering.

Its innovative bot-spotting solution has earned it the Forrester Wave Strong Performer Award and the Sinet 16 Innovator Award. The cybersecurity startup has successfully raised funding from six investors. These rounds of funding have won Netacea £9 million in startup funding.

Vira Health

Founders: Andrea Berchowitz and Dr Rebecca Love
Founded: 2020
Website: vira.health

Vira Health is all about helping women better manage menopause. Its first product is a subscription-based app called Stella, which offers personalised treatments based on their symptoms. It also provides access to menopause experts, guided meditation, educational materials, exercises, recipes and online classes. It is designed for companies that want to expand their employee benefit schemes so that gender equality and inclusivity in the workplace can become a reality. This is key considering in the UK, 30% of women missed work due to menopause symptoms.

Vira Health is available in the UK, Ireland and US and has raised £1.5m in a funding round in 2022 with investors including LocalGlobe, MMC and Amino Collective.

Nanograb

Founders: Debesh Mandal, Christopher Lau, Shanil Panara
Founded: 2022
Website: https://www.nanograb.com/

Nanograb is a computational drug discovery company that uses AI to generate the best combination of binders to treat different diseases. Thanks to this technology, drugs can be better targeted to specific areas of the body, changing the way we understand disease treatment and diagnoses. The startups is currently developing cancer treatments.

Although it hasn’t undergone any funding rounds, Nanograb is currently taking part in the summer cohort of Y Combinator, a US-based tech startup accelerator.

DeepSearchLabs

Founders: Maryam Torshizi
Founded: 2020
Website: https://www.deepsearchlabs.com/

DeepSearch labs is a deeptech company focused on creating specialised and bespoke intelligent search engines for industry. Rather than throwing away tons of time on Google searching for the right answers, industry experts can now find curated reports and search results relevant to their field. The startup labels, organises and denoises results using AI, helping its clients find the information that matters.

Currently, DeepSearch Labs is currently in a Pre Seed funding round financed by SFC Capital and they’ve raised a total of £127k so far.

Orbital Materials

Founders: Jonathan Godwin, Daniel Miodovnik, and James Gin-Pollock
Founded: 2022
Website: https://orbitalmaterials.com/

Using Generative AI and Large Language Models, Orbital Materials develops novel green materials for clean water, air and energy. The startup has developed a foundational model for atoms that can generate materials that can remove contamination or develop novel fuels. Its latest deal was Early Stage VC and has thus far raised $4.8M thanks to its promising environmental agenda.

Eilla

Founders: Nikolay Babulkov, Petar Petrov and Nikola Lazarov
Founded: 2022
Website: https://eilla.ai/

Eilla is an AI assistant for financial services professionals. The LLMs based startup helps professionals save time by producing ad-hoc documents in seconds and accelerating the due diligence process by distilling insights from extensive legal documents. This technology targets some of the chronic issues that handicap the financial services industry, as well-paid professionals often are bogged down by having to search, read, and summarise long reports rather than moving forward with clients.

Unitary

Founders: Sasha Haco and James Thewlis
Founded: 2019
Website: unitary.ai

The internet is replete with disturbing and harmful content that human moderators simply can’t keep up with. Bringing a new disruptive method to make the world wide web a safer place, Unitary is using machine learning to teach AI to identify harmful content within its context. Its patented technology can analyse around three billing images a day, or 25,000 frames of video per second, catching bad actors who would have otherwise slipped through the net.

Unitary announced a £12.3m in Series A funding in October 2023 and is reportedly pulling in seven figures of annual recurring revenue. As the pace of the internet continues to grow at a vertiginous pace, Unitary’s technology will prove indispensable to make the internet a safer space.

WeWalk

Founders: Kursat Ceylan and Gokhan Mericliler
Founded: 2020
Website: http://www.wewalk.io

There’s 253 million people with vision loss and 50 million of them depend on white canes, guide dogs or another person to get from one place to another. For too long, blind and visually impaired people have depended on legacy methods. WeWalk is opening a new frontier in health tech with a cane that uses artificial intelligence to give visually impaired people more autonomy.

Its promises to be disruptive given it already was selected as Amazon’s Startup of the Year and was named a TIME Best Invention. It also has secured £2m in angel investment backed by Manchester City and NESTA, the Social Impact Fund in the UK.

MagicAI

Founders: Varun Bhanot and Sunil Jindal
Founded: 2022
Website: magic.fit

Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the fittest of them all? With an AI-powered personal trainer living in your looking glass, you’ll soon be told if the answer is you or not. Magic AI is transforming the way we think about fitness, making it less intimidating to start getting into shape from the comfort of your home. The AI technology allows the mirror’s intelligent hologram to analyse movements in real-time and provide hyper-personalised feedback.

Despite its young age as a startup, MagicAI has already raised £2m from two venture capital funds and secured investments from prominent figures in companies like Spotify, Stripe, Tough Mudder and Virgin.

IRIS Audio

Founders: Jacobi Anstruther
Founded: 2019
Website: iris.audio

Using cutting edge AI technology to eliminate background buzz, IRIS Audio is working to guarantee crystal clear sound in any industry. Using patented algorithms, IRIS makes it easier for sales teams, extreme sporting environments, and emergency services to communicate on both ends of a call.

Last year, IRIS raised £5.6m in a Series A funding round and is planning to roll out its flagship product, IRIS Clarity, to a wider US audience. As it continues to grow and help us all hear better, IRIS will be another example of the power of AI for good.

HACE

Founders: Eleanor Harry
Founded: 2020
Website: www.thisishace.com

160 million children worldwide are currently still trapped in a cycle of exploitation, a number that has increased by 8 million since 2016. Child labour can be found in nearly every industry and country, posing not only a moral dilemma but also a substantial reputational and financial risk to companies and investors alike. With its AI-powered Child Labour Index, HACE is giving companies a compass to avoid contributing to this social issue.

By giving businesses a quantifiable metric of how contributive their investments are to child exploitation, they can find better ways of fighting against child labour and promoting ethical supply chains.

My SMASH Media

Founders: Fiona Gillies, Christine Hartland, Mahesh Ramachandra
Founded: 2018
Website: https://www.mysmash.media/

The golden age of streaming is gradually drawing to a close, and the pressure to fill the content pipeline with hits has never been more intense. Content creation is both time-consuming and expensive, leaving the industry in search of innovative solutions to discover the hidden gems that today’s audiences crave. The challenge is pitching these projects in formats that can easily sway decision-makers.

Their Pitch Builder powered by AI makes it easy for users to protect their pitch and transform new talent into savvy content creators. It currently boasts nearly 2,000 users with a significant 75% based in the UK and 12% in the US.

AthenaAI

Founders: Askar Bulegenov, Artem Shitov
Founded: 2023
Website: https://athenachat.ai/

Athena AI has developed an all-in-one messenger system for businesses, powered by built-in AI capabilities that can answer customer queries, on the spot. The tech allows businesses to automate their customer support – whether the communication comes in by email, WhatsApp, text or various social media channels.

Although it’s in its infancy, Athena AI envisions itself as the preeminent customer support and sales technology company, driving innovation across industries.

AI Trends among UK startups

AI is on the road to become the newest normalised technology at our reach. These are a couple of trends to be aware of to know where the future of AI lies.

  • AI in medicine: as shown by Mosaic TX and Charm Therapeutics, AI is on a mission to expand the limits of medical technology by making it easier and quicker to find new treatments. On top of this, AI is also boosting the precision of medicine by optimising electronic health records and enhancing diagnostics. This is helping medical professionals to better customise treatment plans and give patients more reassurance.
  • Creative and generative AI: generative AI refers to the sub-field in machine learning where new data or content is made using an existing data set. In more simple terms, just think about technologies like text-to-image or text-to-3D model, or most notably, ChatGPT. What we might see as AI develops is smarter and more accurate generative technologies that will continue to blur the lines between computer and human generated code, text, images, audio, video and art.
  • AI in personalisation: whether this is helping you pick the right outfit on an ecommerce page or helping you curate the right legal documents based on your industry and company size, AI will continue to enhance personalisation.
  • Democratisation in AI: in the future, AI will not be just at the reach of scientists and engineers. As the technology becomes increasingly more embedded in our day to day, we’ll see more initiatives like Stability AI that will add to the low-code or no-code trend in AI. Therefore, we’ll see AI integrating more quickly and efficiently into workplaces.

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Fernanda is a Mexican-born Startups Writer. Specialising in the Marketing & Finding Customers pillar, she’s always on the lookout for how startups can leverage tools, software, and insights to help solidify their brand, retain clients, and find new areas for growth. Having grown up in Mexico City and Abu Dhabi, Fernanda is passionate about how businesses can adapt to new challenges in different economic environments to grow and find creative ways to engage with new and existing customers. With a background in journalism, politics, and international relations, Fernanda has written for a multitude of online magazines about topics ranging from Latin American politics to how businesses can retain staff during a recession. She is currently strengthening her journalistic muscle by studying for a part-time multimedia journalism degree from the National Council of Training for Journalists (NCTJ).

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