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Imperial Innovations leads £6.2m funding round in machine learning ‘world leader’

Cambridge-based behavioural analytics company Featurespace has closed a £6.2m funding round led by Imperial Innovations Group.

The firm, which specialises in ‘Adaptive Behavioural Analytics’ to the financial services and gaming sectors, will use the investment boost to further its expansion into the US as well as make further in-roads into financial services.

Having already invested £3.9m in the technology firm, Imperial have committed a further £2.5m as part of this investment round, along with £2.4m contributed by US venture capital group TTV Capital and a smattering of existing investors.

Counting clients including William Hill and KPMG, Featurespace’s technology is able to monitor the behaviour of individuals in real-time, building up a profile of their normal patterns of behaviour and delivering real-time decisions about potentially fraudulent actions if anomalies are detected.

It claims that its ARIC behaviour analytics engine, which has been developed out of research at the University of Cambridge by the late Professor Bill Fitzgerald and the firm’s Chief Technology Officer David Excell, delivers a ‘significantly higher level of accuracy’ than its competitors.

Jon Edington, Director Technology Ventures at Imperial Innovations, said: “This new funding round reflects the great progress Featurespace has made over the last year, including announcing major new customer wins with companies based in the USA.

He added: “Featurespace’s strong management team has an impressive track record of building B2B software businesses. They are targeting a growing global fraud detection market which was worth $2.4bn in 2014 and is growing at 30% per annum, according to Forrester.

“This new funding will enable the Company to expand its operations in the UK and US and to continue to grow its expansion in financial services.”

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