ICYMI: It’s been an exciting week at Humanising Autonomy. Thursday saw us announce the close of an $11 million Series A alongside investors Beacon Capital LLP and Emellience Partners, who co-led the round. This brings our total capital raised to $17 million since the company’s inception four years ago; a long journey that has seen us grow a team of nearly forty people from over 20 different countries, win numerous awards and partner with some incredible companies. In the aftermath of our Series A, we’re getting lots of questions about where we’ve been and where we’re going. Here’s a brief moment of reflection.
The problem with automated interaction today
Walking down the street, picking up your groceries, driving to a neighbours’ house, looking at an advertisement or commuting into work – at every step, people are interacting with machines more than ever before. Our society is laden with automation meant to make life simpler. However, these machines fundamentally don’t understand human behaviour, making what should be a smoother interaction a more frustrating one. This lack of human context leads to inefficient decisions by the machine, uninformed operational strategies by the business responsible for them and, ultimately, a poor experience for us as people.
Behaviour AI works with people to alleviate the frustration between humans and machines. Predictive algorithms empower smarter decision making that understands and anticipates human behaviour from camera images in an ethical way. This can be applied in any scenario with an automated, autonomous or semi-autonomous system. Fleets outfitted with Behaviour AI experience a 10X reduction in false positives for forward collision warning and blind spot detection. Deploying Behaviour AI onto any pre-existing CCTV camera system means a deeper understanding of how roads and pedestrian pathways are used, optimising the use of space for more intuitive design. Behaviour AI means more effective advertising, what if out of home marketing could yield measurable results?
All of this ultimately means safer roads for people – making Vision Zero a reality, galvanising the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles, spurring the adoption of autonomous technology in any environment. These are only some of the applications applicable in our world today. The world of tomorrow encompasses an entire new set of possibilities: autonomous transportation systems, industry 4.0, smart home and retail, to name a few. Now, businesses can better evaluate and extract insight from their data by teaching their machines to understand human behaviour. As a result, any human/machine interaction is instantly made safer, more efficient, effective – and importantly, more human.
What’s next for Humanising Autonomy?
From a humble team of three to a team of nearly forty, this is only the beginning. The coming year will see new hires across all of Humanising Autonomy’s teams – commercial, product and technology. With new team members joining from Hungary, Germany and the United States, we’re transitioning to a hybrid workspace so we can accommodate any employee, anywhere. A key area of focus is using this investment to expand our diverse team across Europe, Asia and North America. We’re building out new areas of our business – marketing, finance, product management and commercial with several key hires set to start with us over the coming months.
Though Humanising Autonomy started by improving advanced driver assist systems and dash cams, the company is moving into new and exciting markets that can massively benefit from Behaviour AI. 2022 will see the development of new products in advertising effectiveness, smartphone applications, as well as for construction and warehouse safety. Existing offerings in the automotive and dashcam industry will be expanded upon, where Behaviour AI can alert drivers in real-time of potential safety incidents and inform fleet management systems of risky driving situations.
We’re excited to take on the next year and bring you with us! For regular updates about the Humanising Autonomy journey, sign up to our newsletter here.