Foresight Williams Technology (FWT) Funds has invested £1 million in dRISK, an autonomous vehicle (AV) testing and training company. Founded in 2014 by CEO Chess Stetson, dRISK is an artificial intelligence (AI) company which promises to revolutionise the safety of AVs by training them to avoid high risk scenarios. This contrasts with the conventional approach of training AV’s on low-risk driving. dRISK counts multiple leading AV developers among its current customer base -— which is growing rapidly.

dRISK‘s core technology — with four patents granted and two pending — uses networks of data to store, visualise, and reveal ‘unknown unknowns’ in complex and highly sparse data areas.

The commercial roll-out of AVs has failed to live up to expectations due to the technical challenge of dealing with high-risk scenarios which are unlikely, but pose a real risk. dRISK solves this problem by fusing public, private and proprietary data covering high-risk scenarios. dRISK’s statistical robustness and auditability has allowed it to win the largest grant from the UK’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous vehicles; enabling dRISK to build the ultimate test for self-driving cars.

The global market for AI training data alone is currently valued at $1.5 billion. FWT’s investment will accelerate the development and growth of dRISK as a central technology for AV development.

Matthew Burke, head of Technology Ventures at WAE, said: “dRISK’s proprietary technology has the potential to accelerate the development of automated driving control systems and overcome one of the main barriers to self-driving: the identification of edge cases. We are delighted that FWT has made this investment and we expect to leverage our knowledge of the automotive industry to increase uptake of dRISK’s technology.”

Chess Stetson, dRISK chief executive, said: “This investment will allow dRISK to accelerate our business plan and achieve our goal of introducing the dRISK product to the majority of the AV industry. In turn, dramatically accelerating the development of safe and useable autonomous vehicles. We thank Foresight and Williams Advanced Engineering for their support.”

Commenting on the investment, Hugh Minnock, Foresight senior investment manager, said: “Foresight Williams Technology is delighted to invest in dRISK, a hugely exciting company that will hasten the AV revolution and the decarbonised future we expect will follow.”