Prowler.io nabs $13M for its new approach to decision making in AI
Summary
As we continue to see a wide proliferation of artificial intelligence-based startups come to market, one of the persistent and big questions has been is whether an AI system will ever be able to make decisions as well as a human can.A startup out of Cambridge called Prowler.io is developing a new kind of decision-making platform based on probabilistic modelling, reinforcement learning and game theory that it believes may help the AI community answer that question with a yes.Co-founded by two alums from another AI company, VocalIQ, which was acquired by Apple 13 months after launch Prowler.io today is announcing that it has raised \xa310 million ($13 million) to help it along the way.Led by new investor Cambridge Innovation Capital, the round also had participation from Atlantic Bridge Capital as well as previous investors Passion Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and SG Innovate, who participated in Prowlers $2 million seed round last year.Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly crowded area. CB Insights notes there have been more than 250 acquisitions of AI-focused startups since 2012.Prowler.io believes it stands apart from the pack and because of its focus not on perception (one of the biggest areas in AI today, covering areas like computer vision and image recognition), but on decision making.The key thing for us is not what other big AI companies are working on, but what they are not doing, said CEO Vishal Chatrath who co-founded the company with Dr. Dongho Kim, a key VocalIQ alum who is Prowlers CTO.When you look at the Big 5, Chatrath said by which he means Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft or any company using machine learning, they are focusing on deep neural networks using tens of millions of data points. And that similar challenge of perception versus evaluation can be applied to a number of other scenarios.Prowler the name is a reference to looking at a challenge from every angle possible to solve it is coming at the problem by looking to, and triangulating, learnings from math and specifically statistics that it overlays on top of more traditional machine learning.Its platform uses probabilistic models to generalise to novel situations and adapt to changing environments by refining their strategies in data-driven ways; Reinforcement Learning algorithms that estimate and account for uncertainty; and Game Theory to operate in multi-agent settings to infer what humans and other AIs are trying to do.Potentially game-changing, but not that fast to build: Prowler has yet to launch a commercial product, or sign a customer, although it has been hiring a lot of impressive academic talent. (The first thing Chatrath proudly told me during our interview, before we even got started talking about Prowler, was that the company had 50 employees with a number of distinguished professors and other academics among them.) The fact that the company is able to capitalise on the expertise in probabilistic modelling, principled machine learning and game theory available in Cambridge is hugely exciting.
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