Grant Passmore, Informatics alumnus and AI innovator, goes from strength to strength

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Grant Passmore, Informatics alumnus (PhD 2011) and former research associate (LFCS 2011-2014), is a CEO of Imandra Inc, a start-up, co-founded with colleague Denis Ignatovich in 2014.

Reasoning as a Service ®

Since its founding, Imandra has pioneered advances in AI for algorithm safety and compliance and their application to new industries. Their formal verification technology was originally designed to automatically analyse financial algorithms for glitches and unfair behaviour. Today, Imandra’s “Reasoning as a Service ®” platform makes deep advances in symbolic AI for making algorithms safe, explainable and fair widely accessible to those without specialised background in these fields.

Applications in autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning

Currently, Grant and his colleagues are planning to move towards new applications. Last month Imandra Inc. completed a $5 million Seed investment led by AlbionVC, IQ Capital and LiveOak Venture Partners. The capital will be used towards further growth in financial services and fast-growing applications of their AI technology to autonomous vehicles, robotics, and machine learning.

UBS Future of Finance Challenge

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In 2015, the company won the UBS Future of Finance Challenge, coming in 1st place out of more than 600 companies from 52 countries by using its AI 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. Shortly afterward the company managed to attract funding from KRW Schindler, a venture capital firm backed by Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler.

Future expansion

Imandra’s current clients include top global investment banks who rely on Imandra 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.

“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. We’re proud of our team and the advances we’ve made in turning groundbreaking research into a scalable product with wide-reaching positive impact. 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.”

Grant Passmore

Related links

Imandra Inc.

Albion VC press release