Alexa Developer’s Venture, Unlikely AI, Raises $20M in Seed Round

Unlikely AI has closed a seed round for $20 million which will go toward developing its approach to artificial intelligence (AI) and adding employees, a press release said Monday (Sept. 12).

The company was founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, a developer of Amazon Alexa — his first company, Evi Technologies, developed a voice assistant with language understanding and question-answer capability, and the company was acquired by Amazon and used to launch Alexa.

The London-based company has not announced any of its own projects yet, though its website has an example of what it wants to do — an app called Crossword Genius which has AI that can solve and explain “even the most difficult” crossword clues, using machine vision to read in crosswords found in newspapers with a device camera. Then solving takes place on the device.

“The entire team is very excited about the opportunity that this financing has given us to develop Unlikely AI and its technology, and we are delighted to partner with our new investors,” Tunstall-Pedoe said.

The round involved numerous prominent UK venture capital funds like Amadeus Capital Partners and Octopus Ventures, which co-led the round. It also included participation by Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn’s Metaplanet.

Amelia Armour, partner with Amadeus Capital Partners, will be joining the board. She said Unlikely AI has the potential “to disrupt many sectors, and William has the knowledge and experience to build a global company of immense value.”

AI has added uses cases recently, such as by online business-to-business (B2B) platform Xpeer, which rolled out two new search and review products using AI, PYMNTS wrote.

Read more: B2B Platform Xpeer Introduces AI-Powered Tools

The new programs are Xpeer AI and Xpeer Score, which will help businesses choose market leaders to outsource their business operations and information system developments.

Xpeer says it thinks AI will continue boosting automatic production machines, big data analytics, production and sales forecasting and financial projections and more.