Are you a client?
Sign in to view the full news archive.
Newcastle-based Liberal Labs has secured pre-seed funding of £4.6m in a round led by Northern Gritstone and Mercuri, with participation from Sure Valley Ventures, Cambridge Future Tech SPV, and others.
The company takes a logic-based approach to AI, based on Tsetlin Machines (which combine propositional logic with teams of simple automata that learn human-interpretable patterns from data), enabling decisions to be made based on combinations of binary features. It provides a more “explainable AI” alternative to GPU-heavy algorithms, which may also be too large, too expensive, and too energy-intensive for certain use cases – especially where power consumption is a key consideration (such as on remote, battery-powered sensor devices).
Spun out from Newcastle University in 2023, following a collaboration with the Center for AI Research at the University of Agder in Norway stretching back a number of years, Literal Labs describes itself as being on a mission to create “fast, efficient, and explainable AI perfect for edge use” (and hence also energy-efficient). This last point is a concern we tackled in our report on the Managing the sustainable AI paradox late last year; noting that edge AI is currently an under-used tech combo. According to data from TechMarketView’s Sustainability Technology Activity Index (due to be published later this week), only 3.3% of the 396 sustainability-related activities involving AI logged worldwide during 2024 also involved edge computing tech.
The company intends to use the investment to bring its first commercial product to market and grow its engineering team.
Posted by: Craig Wentworth at 09:17
Tags:
funding
edge
logic-based AI
energy-efficient