OctaiPipe, a UK-based startup that offers an end-to-end Edge AI platform for Critical Infrastructure, has secured £3 million in pre-Series A funding and a £500,000 non-equity grant from various investors and partners.
The company will use the funds to further develop its proprietary Federated Learning technology, which enables data scientists and AI engineers to train AI models on IoT devices without compromising data security or performance.
OctaiPipe also announced the appointment of Arnaud Lagarde as its Chief Revenue Officer, who will lead the commercial development of the platform. OctaiPipe aims to tap into the huge potential of AI in Critical Infrastructure, which could save up to £70 billion in energy system costs by 2050 in the UK alone.
The OctaiPipe platform is currently in deployment with over 20 customers and device OEMs across Energy, Utilities, Telecoms, Manufacturing and other sectors.
Mads Jensen, Managing Partner at SuperSeed said, “Critical Infrastructure is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Across Energy, Utilities and Telecoms – on-device Federated Learning has the potential to improve performance, reduce failures, enhance security and lead to more efficient, more sustainable services. The OctaiPipe team has already demonstrated significant customer traction and we are delighted to support them as they scale to address this important market.”
Dr Will Cavendish, Global Digital Services Leader at ARUP, said: “Water treatment is a complex environment that is expensive for water companies to operate and carries significant regulatory risk, including heavy fines for incorrect treatment. Federated Learning – including solutions such as OctaiPipe’s – is an AI technology that can help. It allows continuous learning from multiple and dispersed local data sources, better predicting future challenges. As data from the built environment scales, centralised solutions start to become unmanageable and uneconomic. So Federated Learning reduces cost and cloud dependence, while maintaining model accuracy, security and privacy. Federated Learning also improves system resiliency – meaning there is no downtime risk and systems can remain fully operational in the event of an outage or failure.”
Miles Kirby, CEO of ARM-backed Deeptech Labs said, “At Deeptech Labs, we look for founders addressing global challenges with ground-breaking technology. Eric and the OctaiPipe team are world-leading pioneers of Federated Learning and Edge compute. By applying this technology to Critical Infrastructure as an easy-to-use Platform-as-a-Service, OctaiPipe is helping ensure the services and utilities the world relies on can benefit from the latest advances in AI without incurring the costs and risks of running models on the Cloud.”
Eric Topham, CEO and co-founder of OctaiPipe said, “The world depends on Critical Infrastructure not to fail but, more than that, to continually improve performance, remain secure and continually become more efficient and sustainable. It’s clear that AI has the potential to unlock massive gains in Critical Infrastructure, but only if we can trust that its critical data is secure. With OctaiPipe, data scientists working in sectors such as Energy, Utilities, Telecoms and Security can for the first time use a secure end-to-end platform to design, deploy and manage Federated Learning locally across Edge device networks and at scale. This £3.5 million in funding will enable us to continue advancing our proprietary technology and scale our operations to address this trillion dollar market so that the infrastructure we all rely on is smarter, more sustainable and secure.”
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