Imandra has completed a $5 million seed investment round, led by AlbionVC, IQ Capital and LiveOak Venture Partners.

The capital will be used towards further growth in financial services and applications of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It will also support Imandra’s expansion in both the US and the UK, with significant hiring of AI, engineering and product talent in Austin, London and Edinburgh.

Since its founding in 2014, Imandra has pioneered advances in AI for algorithm safety and compliance and their application to new industries. In 2015, it won the UBS Future of Finance Challenge, by using its technology to find a fundamental flaw in the design of the UBS dark pool previously undetected by the bank and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Current clients include global investment banks, which use it for design, testing and ongoing audits of their complex trading systems. Since the public release of Imandra’s cloud services last year, the company has expanded into robotics, autonomous vehicles and reinforcement learning.

Grant Passmore, co-founder and co-chief executive, said: “As our reliance on complex software grows, deep advances in AI are required to ensure the algorithms we depend on are safe, explainable and fair.

“This investment is a strong recognition of our progress and we’re delighted for the support of our venture partners in our next phase of growth.”

The other co-founder and co-chief executive Denis Ignatovich added: “The need for automated mathematical techniques for algorithm analysis has never been more pressing – industry leaders including Facebook, Amazon and Google are recognising this with significant investments into automated symbolic reasoning for their business use cases.”

Ignatovich and Passmore founded the company in London in 2014, a decade after having met as undergraduate roommates at the University of Texas. In 2019, the company opened its new US headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Robert Whitby-Smith, partner at Albion VC, commented: “Increasing automation safely is critical to most sectors including automotive, aerospace, defence, healthcare, financial services and social media.

“Imandra’s proprietary software which provides automated testing for functional languages and model-based generation of tests will become a key element of the future mix of software testing,” he added.

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