Seldon, the machine learning deployment specialist, has closed a GBP2.7m seed funding round led by Amadeus Capital Partners alongside Global Brain Corporation, Techstars and other existing investors.
Seldon is a pioneering global technology business focused on the fast-growing machine intelligence market. Its open-source machine learning deployment platform makes it easier and quicker to manage, serve and optimise machine learning models at scale. The platform is built on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes.
Since its inception in 2014, Seldon has built a global community of loyal users who leverage their diverse industry backgrounds to provide validation and feedback. Seldon’s initial product offering, Seldon Core, had over 170,000 installs in 2018 and recorded 38 per cent month-on-month growth in H2 2018. In 2019, it will release new enterprise-scale software, Seldon Deploy, which enables data science specialists to move into production more easily with compliance, offering audit trails and approvals, advanced experiments, and model explanations.
Commercial success is being driven by business wins across multiple sectors including fintech and retail sectors, supporting business-critical applications such as FX trading, churn prediction and stock optimization. Seldon was part of Techstars Barclays Accelerator London in 2016 and is a guest advisor to the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence.
This round was led by Amadeus Capital Partners, one of Europe’s most active venture capital investors in AI and machine learning, according to Pitchbook, along with Global Brain Corporation, one of the largest Japanese deep technology venture capital investment firms with global presence in Tokyo, London, Seoul, Singapore and San Francisco, and Techstars, who have been supporting Seldon since it took part in the Barclays Accelerator. Existing investors include Force Over Mass Capital, Playfair Capital, Cascade Global and angels, all of whom committed further capital in the round.
Alex Housley, CEO and founder of Seldon, says: “Machine learning is revolutionising every industry. It has become much easier to build predictive models but deploying and managing these models in production is the limiting factor.”
“The world’s most innovative businesses now face the challenge of creating robust, reproducible and compliant production workflows between disparate teams of data scientists, engineers and business leaders. Seldon and our community, customers and partners are creating the new open standard for machine learning deployment across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”
Alex van Someren, Managing Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners, says: “There has been a lot of hype around machine learning but real-world applications are where the rubber must now hit the road. Seldon’s open standard approach can ‘democratise’ access to AI’s benefits beyond big tech companies. We’re pleased to be funding Seldon as it looks to double its team size in 2019.”
Osborne Clarke provided legal advice to Amadeus Capital Partners and Harper James provided legal advice to Seldon Technologies Ltd in this transaction.
