IP : Ditto AI Ltd - Artificial Intelligence company successfully completes £4m fundraising

Ditto AI Ltd, the UK-based Artificial Intelligence company, is pleased to announce that that it has raised £4m in equity funding. The round was completed by a consortium of private and institutional investors including IP Group plc, the developer of intellectual property-based businesses, and Parkwalk Advisors, the leading EIS fund manager specialising in UK university innovation.

Ditto has patented a scalable technology for creating software advisor bots which replicate the expertise and accountability of real humans. Throughout 2017 the company continued to show strong revenue growth in its first vertical market, Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS), where its products are now in use across a broad range of public sector organisations, FTSE 250 companies and private businesses. It also successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept applications in a number of new areas outside EHS. The funds raised will allow Ditto to extend its presence in the EHS market, further develop its core platform technology and deliver new commercial applications in Tax and Healthcare.

Ditto addresses a fundamental shortcoming in so-called 'black box' approaches to Artificial Intelligence: the system's inability to explain its reasoning. Ditto's applications solve problems and provide conclusions in clear, plain language, giving them an all-important human touch. The technology is particularly well-suited to automating advice in regulated or safety-critical environments, while providing a clear audit trail of decision making, meaning that its potential applications are extremely wide-ranging.

Rick Turner, Founder and CEO of Ditto, said: 'People are increasingly concerned about a perceived lack of accountability in the field of AI and we believe our solutions, which provide clear audit trails, have an important part to play in addressing that problem. Our technology has been many years in the making and this fundraise is a welcome validation of that effort. We now have not only a viable technology platform, but also demonstrable commercial traction in its use. These funds will enable us to capitalise on our early successes and reach for the goal of establishing Ditto as a leading AI company. We are very excited to be embarking on this next phase of the company's growth.'

ENDS

Notes to editors

About Ditto AI Ltd

Ditto AI Ltd is a UK-based, privately held software AI company specialising in the digital delivery of advisory services. It was established with the aim of commercialising research into methods of automating human knowledge. Now patented, its core technology is able to encode knowledge into software applications with unprecedented fidelity and at speeds which are orders of magnitude faster than competing approaches. The results are applications which are demonstrably complete representations of the knowledge of human specialists.

When users subsequently interact with these advisor bots they are, to all intents and purposes, having a consultation with the original human experts, complete with intelligible conclusions and explanations in language they can understand.

The technology allows for scalability in the deployment of automated advisory services, with the added benefit of high degrees of accountability through extensive audit trails. This makes it possible to deliver advice in regulated or safety-critical environments, areas which until now have not easily been addressable by existing AI technologies without significant human intervention.

For more information about Ditto, please visit http://www.ditto.ai/