Opteran masters autonomy with insect-based natural intelligence. Here’s why we invested.
We proudly announce our backing, along with IQ Capital, Episode 1 and Seraphim Capital, of Opteran Technologies — a spinoff company from the University of Sheffield that is designing the next generation of autonomous technology.
The brains behind Opteran, Professor James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope, as well as its commercial champion, David Rajan, convinced us with their unique know-how and capabilities in brain biomimicry, their technological edge and outstanding execution to date.
Autonomous technology has received increased awareness in recent years, with major companies like Tesla and Google making advancements in the space. While they attempt to master autonomous machines through Deep Learning AI and sophisticated pattern matching on massive datasets, numerous technical and structural drawbacks imply that this approach won’t be able to solve autonomy.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Nature already masters autonomy. Insects operate autonomously throughout the natural world, and by studying their behaviors and capabilities, Opteran is creating a blueprint for autonomous tech that has potential to transform the industrial landscape.
Leveraging £6m in grant funding, 8 years of research and 600 million years of evolution, James and Alex gathered a deep understanding of how bees see, process and navigate the world. While bees have small brains with only 1 million neurons, they are still capable of sophisticated decision-making and navigation using optic flow to perceive depth and distance. Their brain size also allows us to more easily understand them, and in Opteran’s case, reverse-engineer their brains to produce algorithms requiring no data center, pattern matching or training. Not only is this a far more efficient, robust and transparent way to achieve autonomy, but it means Opteran can produce “silicon brains” that mimic tasks such as seeing, sensing objects, obstacle avoidance, navigation and decision-making that can then be implanted into autonomous technology.
In a recent trial, Opteran was able to control a sub-250g drone, with complete onboard autonomy, using fewer than 10,000 pixels from a single low-resolution panoramic camera.
As always, here are the top reasons why we chose to invest in Opteran:
Winning team with inherent advantage
Eight years of research by the founders, Professor James Marshall and Dr. Alex Cope, as part of the Green Brain and Brains on Board project, give Opteran a unique advantage to be able to extract real brain function and turn it into algorithms. Though with a strong background in academics, the team is also commercial and focused on execution with David Rajan bringing over 25+ years in commercial experience to the business. We believe that the founding team — united with an ambitious, singular vision to build a “global lead in brain biomimicry” — has what it takes to pioneer this new domain.
Transformative technology
Opteran focuses on understanding how nature has evolved real brains to solve autonomy — starting with a honeybee. The knowledge created in their research was fused into their patented algorithm, creating an optic flow estimator. The resulting algorithm is tremendously efficient and robust. Entirely different from Deep Learning, it works significantly faster (benchmarked against FlowNet 2) and is more understandable. The lightweight, small size and ultra-low power nature of the chip makes Opteran’s solution applicable to a wide variety of uses, enabling the processing of visual data on the edge.
Billion dollar market opportunity
Opteran’s technology opens up huge growth opportunities for robotics, which is expected to grow to $77 billion by 2022. We are convinced that it will transform the use case for a wide variety of autonomous vehicles, drones, mining robots and even off-planet vehicles, as it will enable real-time autonomous decision-making. First introductions to global industrial players in the mining, robotics and agriculture machinery sector within our Join network have shown that the industry is keen to implement Opteran’s technology. Going forward, we will help the team with the commercial and organizational foundations and also with access to customers and strategic alliances in Germany.
For more information about Opteran, please visit https://opteran.com or drop us a line at hello@join.capital
