Opteran, a Sheffield, UK-based Natural Intelligence company, raised £2.1m in seed funding.
The round was led by IQ Capital with participation from Episode1, Join Capital and Seraphim Capital. Following on from a pre-seed round from the Connecting Capabilities Fund of the British Business Bank, the latest round also included angel investors and a CCF grant, a part of the Northern Triangle Initiative.
A University of Sheffield spin-out based on eight years of research by Professor James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope into insect brains as part of the Green Brain and Brains on Board projects and led by David Rajan, CEO, Opteran reverse-engineers biological systems onto silicon, enabling machines to see, sense, navigate and make decisions. Called ‘natural intelligence’, the company aims to break through the limitations of today’s Deep Learning to empower smaller, lighter, ultra-low power solutions that are deployable at the edge without training.
Its innovation enables machines to see, sense, navigate and make autonomous decisions with a smaller, lighter and more efficient solution that operates off-network without training.
The company intends to use the funds to build out functionality in the algorithms and chipsets, including launching Opteran Sense for obstacle avoidance and reactive navigation, Opteran Direct for SLAM, Opteran Decide for autonomous decision-making, and Opteran See – a 360 degree camera. It will also expand its engineering and commercial team, and is currently launching a Development Kit to enable partners to embed its technology in their applications.
FinSMEs
30/11/2020