Tech entrepreneur Vishal Chatrath believes he and senior colleagues have teed up a new wave of global growth after rebranding the Cambridge-based AI and ML decision-making business PROWLER.io as Secondmind.

Launched less than four years ago, the startup’s engagement with international customers has soared as management decided to go for ‘best’ rather than go for broke. 

Today the thrusting young company is re-branded as Secondmind to reflect its globally unrivalled decision-making engine of that name as the technology takes a further upspin.

The company has already raised $50 million from global backers to date with a lot more to come and retains its world lead. Its potential would appear to have no identifiable ceiling. Investors certainly believe so.

But Chatrath and his team – mega-confident in the model – are masterfully controlling the pace of growth to ensure long-term sustainability. It already knows it is best-in-breed. 

It has identified and flourished in its core vertical markets. Having laid the most solid of foundations, Secondmind can now build one of the most powerful AI and ML businesses on the planet.

The rebrand reflects and reinforces the company’s Secondmind Decision Engine – a new paradigm for people in business to make better decisions. 

Backed by more than four years of practical, award-winning artificial intelligence and machine learning research, Secondmind is closing the gap between people and AI with easy-to-use and understand ML technology, designed to help businesses better predict, plan, compete and manage risk in an increasingly uncertain world. 

The Secondmind Decision Engine is an ML-powered software-as-a-service platform designed to supercharge decision-making across myriad industries, including those in which visibility is low, data is sparse, and uncertainty is high. 

The engine leans on direct-to-consumer software design best practices to help non-technical people understand Secondmind predictions, influence outcomes with their domain expertise and make complex decisions with ease and confidence. 

Currently in limited release, the Secondmind Decision Engine is helping decision-makers in leading transportation and logistics companies to make better demand forecasting, planning and asset allocation decisions within their global supply chain operations. 

The scalability and versatility of the ML technology in the Secondmind Decision Engine is also helping leading automotive companies to significantly reduce engine calibration time in production and accelerate time to market for the company’s industry leading fuel-efficient cars. 

While supply chain and automotive have been prime early targets, Chatrath perceives that any corporation dependent on increasing the efficiency of their machines – in multiple markets – and the energy sector would benefit from leveraging Secondmind. These sectors are synergistic enough not to warrant Secondmind straying uncomfortably far from core, says Chatrath.

The young company has already employed some of the brightest maths brains in the world and it shows in the core technology: The Secondmind Decision Engine is powered by a unique combination of Gaussian Process-based probabilistic modelling and decision-making ML libraries. 

This technology suite is adept at quantifying uncertainty, identifying operational trade-offs and explaining outcomes using sparse and low volume data –capabilities that meet business decision-making demands where other ML techniques like Deep Learning struggle.

The technology is the result of more than four years of practical ML research from Secondmind Labs, the research and development arm of the company and on-ramp for promising ML solutions with practical, real-world business decision-making potential. 

Secondmind Labs is led by Professor Carl Edward Rasmussen, a world-leading authority on probabilistic ML, and is home to an award-winning team of researchers, data scientists and machine learning engineers.

Chatrath says: “Today marks an exciting milestone, one that takes us one step closer to achieving our mission of empowering people with AI to make better decisions. 

“The Secondmind team has done an incredible job in transforming leading-edge ML research into impactful decision-making technology and solutions that are already making a bottom-line impact to the businesses of our global partners.”

Backed by leading venture funds including Passion Capital, Pearson and Tencent of China, which also backs games giant Frontier Developments, Secondmind has played a steady hand through the coronavirus pandemic.

Chatrath tells me that the company decided to work remotely at least a month before the Government announced the March 23 lockdown. 

Management read the runes from China’s troubles with the virus as early as February and decided that it had more than enough firepower to let people work from home.

They also decided to surgically examine what, if anything, was holding back the company’s global acceleration and what positive changes might take the business to higher plateaus.

Chatrath says: “Our technology is so early that it is not always easy for potential customers to understand. We decided to better explain what we do and how we do it and lay out the benefits for customers in clear and precise terms so that they could maximise the benefits of our engine.

“We are proud of the fact that throughout the pandemic we have worked incredibly closely with customers and have had the opportunity to explain the technology in detail. We are fortunate to have so many people with 10, 20, 30 years or more experience in the supply chain and automotive sectors.

“We explained that the technology was not designed to and never would replace humans, that machines would not be taking over the world. It is not Matrix or Minority Report or some other Hollywood fiction.

“We explained that humans would make the key decisions – but that they would be helped to do so by our technology. That applies to users whether they are based in Shanghai, Hamburg or London. So we have used our time in the lockdown to great effect.”

Japanese carmaker Mazda is just one of the global clients who have benefited from the close working relationship with Secondmind. Carmakers generally are seeing greater efficiencies in terms of performance and emission control and are benefiting from using Secondmind technology that improve engine calibration while using 1000 times less data compared to current tools. 

This means that a test bench now needs to only run for one hour rather than 1,000 hours to get enough data for calibration – and any machine issue, marine engines, wind and steam turbines can harness these staggering efficiency gains.

Chatrath reports a huge appetite from companies in industrial markets to improve their decision making to take massive time and cost out of their manufacturing operations.

When one considers that carmakers alone could face billions in fines from as early as January 2021 if they fail to hit EU Co2 targets the efficiencies that Secondmind’s engine can help bring about would pay for themselves many times over. 

That’s a decision any company would find easy to make – not so scores of others that Secondmind is geared up to help – but they have core values in common. Values such as heightened credibility in their own marketplace and delivery of an unwavering positive impact on the bottom line.