Episode 1

"Opteran has built the AI technology required to transform autonomous machines beyond today’s limited use in restricted scenarios to enable more widespread adoption,"

"Since meeting Patrick and the Sano team, we have been consistently impressed with their unwavering purpose-led strategy to promote access to, and the success of, personalised medicine. To deliver on the promise of this new approach to treatment, there is an urgent need to solve the largest problems in clinical trials: patient recruitment and engagement. This is where Sano’s innovative software platform, which allows them to interact directly with patients, biotech and broader healthcare communities, can be transformational for the future of personalised medicine."

"We invested in Mimica because the founding team has a terrific combination of deep technical expertise in building AI systems, and a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by an enterprise when managing processes."

"The whole team is excited to take the next step to further support organisations in driving value from their data, so that they can achieve their business goals. The investment from Octopus Ventures is a fantastic affirmation of the scale of impact we’ve been able to deliver to our customers. We look forward to working with Octopus to further develop our product and expand into new markets."

"Scores of new and existing retail businesses now see their future in e-commerce, but while anyone can set up an online store-front and start selling within hours, the infrastructure powering e-commerce is alarmingly outdated, inefficient, inflexible and expensive."

"Most employees within freight forwarders spend the majority of their time communicating with the 10-25 different entities that might be associated with a given shipment and coordinating freight movement and documentation. Communication usually runs through email and attachments, so freight forwarders spend countless hours sorting through documents and manually copying data into a Transportation Management System (TMS), their core system of record. But they’re spending far too much time gathering data rather than analysing it, and they’re using outdated tools which are no longer fit for the complexity of today’s operational and logistical demands."

"We are excited to have secured this substantial new funding so quickly."

"We see the mandate inside organisations to adopt serverless is coming from the top. The technical executives see serverless as a competitive advantage for their business. It’s the same market motion we saw several years ago when organisations moved from on-premise solutions to the cloud. This wasn’t a bottom up adoption, but rather a top-down approach. This same is now happening with serverless and it is our goal at Webiny to enable this new wave of infrastructure transformation."

"Businesses and law firms now realise that with the right technology, tasks that used to require significant amounts of time and effort, can be largely completed in seconds. Our technology can summarise thousands of documents and extract the key points in a fraction of the time. It can read and edit legal documents with far less human effort and can give specific advice automatically. We have typically saved our clients around 70% of their costs related to contract review. Our technology is AI+, advanced machine learning combined with human expertise that enables our customers to focus on the more complex, strategic work they?re best at."

"Most companies now realise that they can’t continue to compete without underpinning decision making with data but when looking to leverage a cloud data warehouse the choice they face is either outsource the processing of data to expensive agencies or hire data engineering and build this internally. With our platform, businesses can put the power of data engineering in the hands of their analysts and achieve a massive acceleration in value in a much shorter time while retaining the valuable knowledge about their own business logic in-house."

"Digital identity is an important investment theme for us and the key to unlocking the next leg of growth for the digital economy. The kind of frictionless authentication the founders have delivered is pretty close to magic. When a team, an idea and a solution come together at the same time – that’s what being a VC is all about"

"While talent is evenly distributed around the world, for too long, opportunities have not been. I have experienced first hand the challenge of hiring globally. When I was a CEO attempting to grow a team across different jurisdictions I was dismayed by the baroque complexity and lack of affordable tech-driven solutions."

"In the past relocation agents were incredibly expensive and time-consuming, involved limited choices, lots of travelling back and forth to view properties and visit banks, and was an extremely fragmented experience. Perchpeek’s technology is a game-changer for most companies who can now offer high quality, affordable relocation support to employees of any level wanting to move to any country or city in the world."

"Not only has the global pandemic provided the catalyst for a mass shift into multi-channel commerce over the next five years, but there is a real D2C revolution happening. Thousands of young D2C businesses are bypassing conventional retail channels to engage directly with consumers."

"Remote work is one of the great equalisers of our time,"

"We’re building an open source database for time series data, and time series databases are a multi-billion-dollar market because they’re central for financial services, IoT and other enterprise applications. And we basically make it easy to handle explosive amounts of data, and to reduce infrastructure costs massively,"

"We started experimenting with selling online to see what problems sellers face and it was amazing how quickly it became obvious to us that this was the major one. Quite literally, no fulfilment service would touch us until we could guarantee high volume sales."

"Current sourcing methods aren't fit for brands of the future; they're offline, inefficient and fragmented. Technology is needed for global supply chains to progress and become faster, more efficient and more sustainable. At SupplyCompass we see the key to success lying in rethinking existing sourcing methods, with better collaboration, innovation and technology at the core. Our vision is to help fashion and interior brands make products that don't have to cost the earth, and this funding from investors Episode 1 will help us to do just that."

"The work of data scientists is especially important in the area of finance, where a single slip in rationality can lead to a devastating effect on the value of an investment portfolio. Algorithms don’t feel the emotional strain of a declining portfolio value, or make flawed decisions tainted by innate human biases. As a result, algorithmic decision making in financial markets has grown explosively in recent times."

"Our customers win and lose contracts based on the speed at which they can scale their workforce. They need the right people with the right skills in the right place, often at short notice. If they can’t find them quickly, it can cost them dearly. We created Pickr specifically to solve this problem,"