Pitch for Investment

Luffy AI

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Introduction

“Imagine a future where industry, the backbone of society, is revitalised. The rising costs of labour and energy and a retiring workforce are significant cross-sector industrial challenges. Furthermore, the resources sector is transitioning to more energy efficient and autonomous processes with lower emissions, while manufacturers are driving productivity improvements enabled by increasing automation and quality. AI enables powerful new solutions to drive the next industrial revolution. It also unlocks previously inaccessible value from equipment and processes.

Luffy AI is at the forefront of this change, offering control and optimisation solutions to make industrial processes and robotics more productive and energy efficient, while promoting a circular economy and the use of recycled materials.” — Matt Carr, Luffy AI co-founder and CEO.

Industrial control systems are present in every stage of the manufacturing process and account for a vast, though largely hidden, part of the cost and energy requirements of production of all goods we consume and use.

But although they tend to work perfectly to start with, constant changes in the system like wear and tear or component failure results in degraded performance — ultimately leading to energy wastage and inconsistent product quality.

To keep them working optimally requires continuous supervision and tuning by skilled engineers.

For Luffy AI this is a massive opportunity. The company, founded by Matt Carr and Alex Meakins in 2019, is a spin out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). They have developed a radically different approach to AI, using a novel approach to neural networks by building in a self-learning capability, or neuroplasticity (the ability to change and adapt in response to new experiences).

Where most controllers use deep reinforcement learning techniques — which require a huge amount of data, energy and oversight — Luffy AI’s Adaptive AI control platform starts with simulated training data and then continues to learn from its own experience in the hardware. The adaptive AI controllers work entirely autonomously and on extremely low levels of power and computing capacity to self-tune and adapt to keep the equipment working within target operating parameters.

The Science

Luffy AI’s offering is a revolutionary software framework that adapts to changing environments, variability and uncertainty giving it a human-like adaptive intelligence that optimises complex systems.

The most widely used control systems today are PID controllers, which are essentially a tuned set of mathematical equations. Unfortunately these systems only work when correctly tuned, so come with a number of limitations; “changes in the system, business goals, rising energy costs, increased use of recycled materials or even a change in the ambient environment such as increased humidity can push a control system outside its target operating envelope.

Adaptive AI overcomes these limitations “by enabling the creation of a new class of neural networks that can learn and adapt at the Edge. It employs biologically inspired mechanisms, such as neuroplasticity and neuromodulation embedded in the neural network and using real-time feedback from the systems to tune themselves to the machine in question. It uniquely tunes itself to that machine, embedding an optimization loop into the neural network that can adjust based on live data.

UKI2S Impact

“We backed the co-founders at the end of 2019 with just £25,000 to give them something to live on whilst setting the company up, following that up soon after with a further £340,000 alongside introducing them to Innovate UK and supporting them to win a sizeable grant. In early 2022 we introduced them to other investors, supporting a round that brought in a total of £1.9m, and earlier this year we added a further £400,000 as part of a round that brought in two important corporate investors and a US family office. This brings our total investment to £965,000.

We have worked closely with the founders over the past four years, introducing board memes, investors and customers to help them build a solid foundation for something that we are really excited about. They are still largely in stealth mode but we think are likely to attract a considerable amount of attention as their first proper customer trials start to read out and – we hope and expect – lead to full scale adoption in some very high profile sectors.

It is obvious that efficiency translates into savings in both cost and energy – and therefore reduction of both carbon and waste. Luffy’s technology promises much, and we hope to see it contributing to global goals as well as their clients’ bottom line.” – UKI2S Fusion Investment Director, Mark White

Matt Carr, Luffy AI co-founder and CEO, said:

“UKI2S are the experts at early stage tech investing. They know how to spot promising ideas and technologies, and know how to nurture them through those crucial early years. They are also very good at setting their companies up with the relationships needed to grow and prosper. We’ve found UKI2S to be a very supportive, patient and fair investor, who should be at the top of the list for any up and coming UK tech entrepreneurs”

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