AlbionVC co-leads a £7.1m Series A investment into Seldon

18th November 2020

AlbionVC co-leads together with Cambridge Innovation Capital, a £7.1m Series A into Seldon, a London based machine learning deployment startup.

The round also includes significant participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners and Global Brain, with follow-on investment from other existing shareholders.

Seldon is a cloud agnostic Machine Learning (ML) deployment specialist which works in partnership with industry leaders such as Google, Red Hat, IBM and Amazon Web Services. Seldon’s suite of products enhances ML deployment pipelines with best-in-class explainability, governance and monitoring functions. Since September 2018, Seldon has experienced 38% month-on-month growth.

The company’s flagship open-source project Seldon Core has over 700,000 models deployed to date, drastically reducing friction for users deploying ML models. Seldon’s technology can help to ensure decisions made by ML algorithms are transparent and ethical, enabling customers to regulate the deployment of their models with significant oversight. Customers have experienced productivity gains of 92% as a result of utilising Seldon’s product portfolio.

Seldon caters to a wide range of industries, across healthcare through to retail, of all sizes ranging from startups to tech giants. The company has seen significant adoption by financial services companies since it was founded in 2014, and now counts an American stock exchange and global credit card companies including US bank Capital One as users.

The £7.1M funding will be used to accelerate R&D and drive commercial expansion. Seldon will take Seldon Deploy – a new enterprise solution which builds on Seldon Core’s capabilities and automates even more ML engineering tasks – to market. Seldon plans to more than double the size of the team over the next 18 months, and make several strategic hires in data science research and engineering to support further rollouts. Seldon will also build out its global footprint with a new go-to-market team in the US, a solutions-based engineering team in Asia, and a new R&D lab in Cambridge, UK.

Alex Housley, CEO and founder of Seldon said:

“There’s never been a greater need to effectively deploy ML models in enterprise, and this fresh capital injection will ensure our customers have the tools they need to achieve their goals. We’ll be heavily investing in R&D so our users and the open-source community have access to cutting-edge intelligent software applications that will unlock the power of machine learning. As we enter a new decade the importance of explainable AI and robust monitoring tools cannot be overstated, and we’re excited to welcome Albion and Cambridge Innovation Capital as new partners as we scale our international operations”

Nadine Torbey, Investor AlbionVC said:

“Seldon is at the forefront of the next wave of tech innovation, and the leadership team are true visionaries. Seldon has been able to build an impressive open source community and add immediate productivity value to some of the world’s leading companies. Seldon’s thorough understanding of market dynamics and customers’ commercial needs places them in a unique position to support users as they deploy machine learning models at scale. We are delighted to co-lead their Series A round and join them on their amazing journey as they embark on the next stage of growth.”

Vin Lingathoti, Partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital said:

"Machine learning has rapidly shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have for enterprises across all industries. Seldon’s open-source platform operationalises ML model development and accelerates the time-to-market by eliminating the pain points involved in developing, deploying and monitoring Machine Learning models at scale. The founding team has deep domain expertise and truly understands the complexities involved with ML model management. CIC is excited to partner with Seldon as the teams builds the next-gen ML Ops platform to democratise AI across enterprises”