AI self-hosting start-up Doubleword finds new Dawn with £9m funding boost

A British start-up which enables companies to 'self-host' their artificial intelligence functions will this week announce that it has raised nearly £10m in a round led by one of Europe's leading venture capital firms.

Sky News understands that Doubleword - previously called TitanML - has secured the funding from Dawn Capital, a backer of successful technology companies including Mimecast and iZettle. Doubleword was set up to tackle what is known among tech experts as the 'inference problem', with AI becoming increasingly central to companies' interactions with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.

Money latest: Uber making big changes to how you pay Inference refers to the process of running live data through a trained AI model to make predictions or undertake tasks such as answering questions or generating images. Peter Kyle, the science, innovation and technology secretary, said in a statement: "AI will help us to deliver growth for our economy and new opportunities for people up and down the country, so it's vital businesses have the confidence to adopt and realise its potential.

"Doubleword's work is helping set the standard for how companies can do exactly that - adopting AI quickly and efficiently so they can realise their ambitions and allow their workers and customers to thrive in the age of AI." Mr Kyle claimed: "This is yet another illustration not just of how British-born tech expertise is tapping into AI to help give businesses the world over a unique point of difference, but in the steps we've taken to make our tech sector a true global magnet for innovation and investment." The $12m (£9m) funding round will be announced on Thursday. Meryem Arik, co-founder and chief executive of Doubleword, said: "Our customers want to build AI-powered applications-not AI infrastructure.

"We eliminate the heavy lifting of inference at scale so they can go from idea to production faster, without racking up technical debt." "We ensure that our customers can deploy any AI model with a single click, while always having the latest models and hardware supported - and without being wedded to a single model provider." The new capital will be used to grow Doubleword's workforce as it build partnerships with tech giants such as Snowflake and Nvidia. Doubleword's other backers include AI entrepreneurs such as Florian Douetteau, the chief executive of Dataiku, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.

"Enterprises creating specific business-critical AI would gladly self-host, if 'expertise' and 'cost' didn't sound like double trouble," Mr Douetteau said. Read more from Sky News:China moves to ease tariff pain ahead of US trade war talksPlans to expand massive offshore windfarm under threat "Doubleword flips the script, making self-hosting effortless and reshaping the market for enterprise customers." Haakon Overli, general partner at Dawn Capital, described the company as "the most exciting start-up in this space".

"They are scaling a product that businesses need at the right time, with the right expertise.".