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Opteran
Natural intelligence company
- 21-100 employees
- B2B
- Artificial Intelligence
- Deep Tech
- Robotics
- Broomhall, Sheffield, UK
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Company mission
To translate our understanding of insect brains into a technology platform that will enable all manner of machines to see, sense, navigate and decide.
Our take
Deep Learning methods have fast become the standard for moving towards machine autonomy, but the autonomy problem has already been solved to an astounding degree by natural systems – brains. Opteran has pioneered brain biomimicry, the ability to understand and re-engineer real brains, reproducing these biological systems to run on low-end silicon, which it calls “natural intelligence”.
Opteran, founded in 2020, began by investigating how insect brains see, navigate, avoid collisions, and make decisions. This was then mimicked and captured on silicon for use in machines, resulting in a product that is impressively small, lightweight, and does not require data; plus its orders of magnitude are more robust than current approaches. Opteran’s breakthrough technology could be employed across industrial, consumer and transport uses – from warehouse security to autonomous cars, to smart vacuums and lawnmowers.
Opteran has seen good levels of investment which will fund further development in its natural intelligence technology, as well as go towards opening offices and supporting customer pilots. Its current focus is natural brain decision-making for machines, with possible future expansion into computer vision and other decision-making applications.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Benefits
- 25 days holiday per year (plus 8 UK public holidays)
- Eligible for our employee equity scheme
- Flexible working hours; holiday swaps
- Team socials
- Salary sacrifice and 5% employee contribution to the company pension scheme
- Progressive leave policies
- Cycle to work scheme
Funding (2 rounds)
Jun 2022
$12m
EARLY VC
Nov 2020
$2.7m
SEED
Total funding: $14.7m
Leadership
David Rajan
(CEO)Founder and former Chairman of Centaur Robotics. Previously Director, VP and Partner at Marakon. Co-founded Union Network.
Alex Cope
(CTO)Former Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield, with a PhD which was based upon Computational Neuroscience and Biomimetic Robots.
James Marshall
(CSO)Former Professor of Theoretical and Computational Biology at The University of Sheffield. Previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, with prior experience as a Researcher.