In a significant pre-seed funding round, AI start-up Literal Labs has successfully raised £4.6 million to enhance its engineering team and prepare for the launch of its first commercial product. The Newcastle-based company, which doubled its workforce from 6 to 12 employees last year, is gearing up for a market debut. The funding round was led by Northern Gritstone, with Mercuri as a co-leader.
CEO Noel Hurley highlighted the importance of this funding in advancing product development, particularly for clients in regulated industries seeking greater explainability in AI solutions. The company’s logic-based AI aims to be faster, more energy-efficient, and more transparent than current neural network offerings, potentially replacing energy-intensive algorithms that rely heavily on GPU power.
Benchmarking by MLPerf Anomaly has shown that Literal Labs’ technology can deliver 54 times faster inferencing and 52 times less energy consumption compared to similar neural networks, along with 250 times faster performance than XGBoost for machine learning applications.
Northern Gritstone’s CEO, Duncan Johnson, expressed enthusiasm for supporting Literal Labs, marking the firm’s first investment linked to Newcastle University, a hub for technology research. The leadership team at Literal Labs includes Noel Hurley, a former Arm executive, and Leon Fedden, the newly appointed Chief Technology Officer, previously with AstraZeneca’s AI Deep Learning platform.
