Cambridge’s global kudos as a breeding ground for cutting edge Artificial Intelligence has been strengthened further by a new startup that has raised £1.5 million seed funding from key investors in the space.

PROWLER.io will initially focus on gaming then move into autonomous vehicles, smart city simulations and synergistic autonomous systems including drones and robots.

It has been backed by Hermann Hauser’s Amadeus Capital Partners, which was in on the ground floor of VocalIQ, Passion Capital and Infocomm Investments.

PROWLER.io bots use ‘reinforcement learning’ – a subset of machine learning which enables long chains of complex decisions to be made autonomously, so bots can learn and adapt to changing environments.

CEO Vishal Chatrath has come out of VocalIQ, a speech-related AI company sold to Apple in October 2015 for up to $100 million.

The seed cash will enable the UK startup to build a prototype version of its platform with select partners. Initially the company will target games developers, with numerous other sectors to follow. Starting in the gaming industry, PROWLER.io’s technology will enable superior decision-making and much more natural in-game behaviour from non-player characters (NPCs) through AI, revolutionising current games industry techniques and thinking.

NPC behaviour is currently still controlled by hand-crafted decision rules, often leading to unnatural and repetitive gameplay. Using machine learning instead enables improved testing and an enhanced gameplay experience, as well as speeding development and making it far less cumbersome.

In addition to gaming, PROWLER.io is looking towards autonomous vehicles (cars, drones, etc.), smart city simulations and robotics as additional fields which can benefit from the application of bots which are autonomous, tunable and self-learning.

The development path for those sectors is similar to that required by gaming and therefore the research is easily transferable to many other use cases and commercial opportunities. Analysts predict that these industries will reach a combined total value of more than $1 trillion by 2025.

The technology powers highly artificially intelligent bots which learn and adapt to changing environments – making NPCs act much more naturally in an environment being destroyed in a video game gun battle, or enabling an autonomous vehicle to deal intelligently with the constantly changing road and traffic conditions around it.

Vishal Chatrath said: “Gaming is a 100-billion-dollar industry which is still reliant on hugely complex, inflexible and expensive hand-made decision rules. As well as being extremely labour-intensive to build, they also deliver a substandard experience for gamers: NPCs don’t evolve as the game environment changes, for example.

“With so many games now relying on extended playing time to generate revenue, it’s more important than ever for developers that games don’t become boring or repetitive. Sophisticated AI and machine learning is the best way to create and deliver that experience, and can reduce cost at the same time. It’s a win-win.

“Looking at other applications and industries, the use of next-generation machine learning algorithms greatly reduces the cost and difficulty of developing highly intelligent AI bots, improving safety and utility in all sorts of applications and saving billions of dollars in development costs in the process.”

Hermann Hauser added: “Clearly there are very compelling investment opportunities around reinforcement learning, which is one of the most active research areas in AI and machine learning.

“As a research-led start-up, PROWLER.io is at the very forefront of this emerging technology and is leading the charge to apply reinforcement learning to many current and future challenges. This state-of-the-art technology will continue to develop in the coming years and there are certain to be important applications that we haven’t yet considered.”

PROWLER.io’s advisory board comprises some of the world’s foremost experts in machine learning and includes Professor Carl Rasmussen, Professor of Information Engineering, Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge; Professor Kee-Eung Kim, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; and Dr. Marc Deisenroth, Lecturer in Statistical Machine Learning at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London.

Vishal Chatrath was the first employee and management team member of VocalIQ. Before that he founded Chleon Automotive, an auto telematics company, and also led Nokia’s automotive team which developed MirrorLink, an open technology standard for connecting smartphones and cars.
CTO and co-founder Dr Dongho Kim is an expert in reinforcement learning, POMDP and statistical dialog systems. Kim first teamed up with Chatrath at VocalIQ, where he formed the core of the machine learning team.

Dongho is a former post-doctoral research associate in Cambridge University’s Engineering Department. He obtained his PhD in AI at KAIST in 2011.

The third co-founder is Aleksi Tukiainen, a former master’s student at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering where he was studying machine learning methods and control systems. Tukiainen has been designing and managing engineering projects for a number of years, working on collaboration platforms, solar vehicle design as well as self-learning robots.

Since inception in 1997, Dr Hauser’s Amadeus vehicle has raised over $1billion for investment and backed more than 100 companies in the software, mobile, internet, cyber security and medical technology sectors. The investment team is based in India, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA, has deep experience in technology and invests in high-growth companies from early stage to pre-IPO.

Major businesses built by Amadeus include wireless trailblazer CSR – now owned by Qualcomm; Solexa, a developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina to create the world leader in gene-sequencing technology; Optos, the retinal imaging company, acquired by Nikon; ForeScout, a global enterprise security vendor; Octo Telematics, the provider of insurance telematics services acquired by Renova Group; and Tobii, the global innovator in eye tracking (STO: TOBII).