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Octopus Ventures invests £2 million in True Knowledge as the development of its unique search technology accelerates
- Octopus Ventures and its investors are sole VC investors
- Represents commitment of over £2.6 million to True Knowledge to date
Octopus Ventures Ltd, specialists in investment in early-stage businesses, are pleased to announce the investment of £2 million in True Knowledge (‘the Company’), the UK internet technology pioneers responsible for the development of a radically new approach to internet search.
This second round of funding, provided exclusively by Octopus Ventures, will enable True Knowledge to accelerate progress towards an open beta site and eventual delivery of its unique search functionality to mass-market consumers. In June 2007, Octopus Ventures was the sole Investor Group to participate in True Knowledge’s initial funding round and committed over £600,000.
More than half of the capital raised in the recent funding round was provided by Octopus Titan VCT 1 plc and VCT 2 plc, which were launched in October 2007 in order to generate real returns for investors over the longer term through investment into early-stage and expansion-stage companies. The remainder was provided by members of the Octopus Investor Group in addition to the Octopus Eureka and EIS funds.
True Knowledge’s revolutionary patented technology has the potential to significantly enhance the way in which factual information is made accessible via the internet by intelligently answering questions asked on any topic in plain English.
Traditionally, internet search engines have relied on statistical relationships between words to provide users with documents and web pages potentially relevant to their search criteria. However, they have been unable to make sense of the content retrieved or capable of providing an ‘intelligent’ response.
Rather than trying to teach computers to read and understand the thousands of text-based web pages that are produced every hour, True Knowledge neatly side-steps this problem by structuring knowledge in a way that computers can digest and understand.
The result is a unique online tool with the ability to provide an intelligent response to questions by applying information gathered from several sources without human intervention, thereby dramatically improving the accuracy and speed of response associated with internet search.
With over 100 million facts in its rapidly growing knowledge database, True Knowledge’s technology compliments existing search engines and offers a new class of application. It has the potential to create a universally accessible knowledge-base capable of deducing answers to questions through the analysis of information available in its existing database and acquiring new knowledge through interaction with users.
Over the past six months, True Knowledge has successfully completed a beta trial of its technology with over 10,000 expert users who put its question-answering website to the test. This has provided valuable proof of concept and enabled the Company to collate further knowledge in order to support the development of its in-house encyclopaedic capabilities.
Commenting on today’s announcement, Alex Macpherson, Chief Executive, said: “Over the past year True Knowledge has successfully completed a number of critical milestones and we have been delighted with the progress they have made. Their technology has the potential to genuinely transform the way in which people around the world interact with the internet. We believe the Company is well on its way to delivering a truly unique mass-market internet search capability, with the potential to generate significant returns for our investors.
“We are delighted to be backing William and the rest of his team as the Company enters the next exciting phase of its development.”
William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder of True Knowledge, said: “Both the financial support that Octopus Ventures and their investors have provided and the wealth of industry expertise that has been made available to us through their Investor Group has undoubtedly accelerated our progress and opened many doors in the last year. We are extremely grateful for their continued support.”
Their ongoing commitment to our business is further validation of the potential inherent within our product and we are looking forward to continuing the strong relation we have established with them going forward.” |