James and Alex’s spinout Opteran Technologies today announced its £2.1 million seed funding round, led by IQ Capital, with participation from Episode 1, Seraphim, and Join. The investment will enable them to further develop and commercialise their core ‘Natural Intelligence’ technology stack for autonomous systems, which is based on core IP developed during the Brains on Board research project.

The funding announcement received widespread coverage including in mainstream media:

‘How insect brains could help build technology to steer driverless cars’, The Telegraph, 24 November 2020.

James and Alex, together with David Rajan, have secured £230,000 of pre-seed investment from the Northern Triangle Initiative, part of the Connecting Capabilities Fund of the British Business Bank, to move Opteran Technologies towards the market.

Opteran Technologies is commercialising research undertaken during the Green Brain and Brains on Board projects, and is developing novel solutions to autonomy that do not rely on machine learning.

James and Giovanni have been awarded the basic research grant Swarm Awareness from the ONRG. The Swarm Awareness project aims to endow a swarm with awareness of its own state, thus allowing individual agents to reach a consensus on the global swarm state.

Particular examples of states to measure are swarm size (number of agents), fraction of the swarm committed to a unique decision (quorum), and super-threshold decision (decision-state). For open positions, visit the project web page.