Investors from Europe and Asia have contributed to a $15 million funding round for Cambridge artificial intelligence startup Fetch.AI.

A further, follow-up funding round would appear to be on the cards as Fetch.AI accelerates development of what it bills as the world’s first smart ledger.

Prominent unspecified technology investment houses participated in the round and are expected to follow through.

Fetch.AI, whose team includes original pioneers of DeepMind (sold to Google for some $500m) is harnessing machine learning and blockchain development capability to build a massive ‘decentralised digital world.’

The fresh $15m will further technical development, corporate partnerships and academic relationships. Original seed funding was provided by leading Web 3.0 venture capital firm Outlier Ventures.

Fetch.AI’s decentralised digital world provides a home for Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs) able to conduct useful economic work on behalf of humans or machines.

Humayun Sheikh, CEO and co-founder of Fetch.AI said: “We are delighted to have raised $15m. This allows us to bring in more top talent focused on areas like machine learning, artificial intelligence and decentralised computing. 

“It gives us the resource to take Fetch to the next level and accelerates our already rapid progress on all aspects of our innovative convergence of so many exciting technologies.”

Transport is one of many key verticals being targeted by Fetch.AI. The potential for AEAs to work together to simplify highly complex journeys by autonomously coordinating is significant.

To that end, Fetch.AI recently joined MOBI, a consortium of major automotive manufacturers including BMW, Ford, GM and Renault that’s dedicated to establishing blockchain standards in areas such as vehicle identification and autonomous vehicle management. 

The Fetch.AI system is underpinned by the world’s first smart ledger that scales to millions of transactions per second at near zero cost, using a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure. 

The introduction of transaction lanes combined with advanced machine learning algorithms enable the ledger to probabilistically determine the validity of a transaction – dramatically improving performance.

From its base at St John’s Innovation Centre, Fetch.AI is building a technical team and a network of corporate and academic partnerships. The next major milestone for the project is the public release of its testnet, which is expected later in 2018.

Image courtesy: Jonathan Rhodes