Cashing in investment from Passion Capital, Amadeus Capital and Infocomm Investments, AI startup Prowler.io has announced the closure of a £1.5m Seed round.
This investment will enable the startup to build a prototype version of its platform with select partners. Initially, the company plans to 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, the startup 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 these sectors is similar to that required by gaming and therefore the research is easily transferable to many other use cases and commercial opportunities.
The firm is using “reinforcement learning”, a kind of machine learning which enables long chains of complex decisions to be made autonomously. The function of this system is to develop machine learning algorithms to improve the quality and development speed of AI decision-making systems. Prowler is therefore using AI to improve AI.
Though it is currently based in Cambridge, the startup is optimistic about moving into other locations and other sectors including autonomous vehicles and smart city simulations sometime in the future, as both capabilities and finances expand. Vishal Chatrath, CEO of Prowler.io, explained,
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.
The road ahead for Prowler is pretty clear. Right now, it is targeting its bots at games developers, and with its recent in-flow of funding, it plans to build a prototype version of its platform. Eileen Burbidge, partner at Passion Capital, commented:
We invested in Prowler.io because we see near limitless use cases for next-generation machine and reinforcement learning to revolutionise industries.
She also added,
From smart city infrastructure to agriculture to drones, in the very near future powerful artificial intelligence is going to change the world we live in for the better. The huge potential of the technology combined with the calibre of the Prowler.io team make this a very exciting proposition.
The startup highly experienced team of researchers and engineers are developing revolutionary next-generation machine learning algorithms that will massively improve the quality and development speed of AI decision making systems.
From game technology to the way people choose to get around in their cities to the very way people live in their spaces, Prowler.io is poised to take the tech world by storm.
