Octopus Ventures, a London, UK-based venture capital firm, has raised £120m for a new fund dedicated to investing in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence startups in the UK.
Commenting on the new fund and explaing the reason behind its focus, Octopus Ventures’ head Alex Macpherson said: “….the challenge today is pretty much every business that comes through to us is machine learning or artificial intelligence.”
Octopus Ventures is part of the Octopus group, a UK fund management business with leading positions in several specialist sectors including property finance, healthcare, energy and smaller company investing. It targets teams building businesses that can scale to create, transform or dominate an industry. Octopus Ventures can invest from £250k to £25m in a first round of funding looking to follow in subsequent rounds.
In recent years, the firm has backed the founding teams of over 50 companies across Europe including Zoopla Property Group, Secret Escapes, SwiftKey and graze.com. Founded in 2000, Octopus manages more than £5.5 billion of funds on behalf of 50,000 investors.
FinSMEs
23/03/2017