Captur, a London headquartered start-up which has built an enterprise AI platform for real-time, rules-based image recognition, has secured £2.2m in its latest funding round, bringing its total fundraised to date to £3.5m.
The Seed investment round was led by Sure Valley Ventures, with participation from existing investors MMC Ventures and Ascension Ventures. Other investors included the likes of operator angels, ex-Deliveroo, and enterprise AI investors Concept Ventures and Two Culture Capital, backers of ElevenLabs and Electric AI.
It plans to use this investment to scale its technology offering across the logistics, transportation, and automotive sectors, with a mission to build visual AI automation into the logistics of every modern enterprise. Its current customers include HumanForest, Dott, Moove, and the company is in discussions with logistics firms and Fortune 100 retailers. Captur is already operating across Europe, with plans to launch in the US early next year.
Captur was founded in 2020 by Charlotte Bax who was part of the Google for Startups Female Founder resident programme. Charlotte is a founder of the Deep Learning Computer Vision meetup group in London, which brings together data scientists, engineers, and practitioners all working on cutting edge applications in computer vision.
Whilst working at an enterprise AI start-up, selling to Fortune 500 companies like Target and Macys, Charlotte experienced first-hand how difficult it was for companies to adopt AI. Image-based AI in particular requires a huge amount of work to manual label, evaluate models, and embed them into production apps, but with a scalable API-focused infrastructure, AI automation can transform profitability and user experience.
Captur’s visual AI solution is unique because it makes it easy for any product team to set their own business logic, is fast to implement with low developer lift, and improves over time with little manual input. Its technology offers product owners easy-to-embed APIs and SDKs that act as a smart camera within their mobile apps and can do the AI compute in real-time. This helps companies to scale their logistics with confidence, proactively reducing support tickets and fraud while delivering a better user experience.
Captur is currently being used in the delivery sector for drivers to map doorways and verify the correct address, reducing delivery to incorrect addresses and fraud by up to 40%, equivalent to almost £10m in annual cost savings for enterprises.
The company’s technology uses Edge AI, the implementation of artificial intelligence in an edge computing environment, which allows calculations to be completed nearby to where data is created, rather than an offsite data centre or a centralised cloud computing facility. This localised processing allows Captur’s technology to make decisions using visual AI in under 3 seconds.
Charlotte Bax, CEO, said: ‘We are delighted to have received this new round of investment from Sure Valley Venture and our existing partners. In the delivery sector alone, companies can spend up to $20m per year on refunds and customer support, in addition to a frustrating experience for their customers. We look forward to improving profitability and driving growth in the [delivery] sector with AI image recognition, and to use visual AI to build trust in the modern economy.”
Isabelle O’Keeffe, Partner at Sure Valley Ventures, said: ‘Captur’s innovative Edge technology using visual AI has significant potential to transform the efficiency and profitability of businesses across multiple sectors and the market opportunity and demand for the product is great. At Sure Valley we focus on investing in businesses with strong founding teams and proprietary technology which have global impact, all of which Captur epitomises. We’re delighted to be partnering with Charlotte and the Captur team and are excited to see what they do next.”
