Innovations leads £1.5m funding round for Cambridge software developer Featurespace
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Imperial Innovations Group plc (AIM: IVO, ‘Innovations’), a leading technology commercialisation and investment group, has led a £1.5m funding round for Featurespace, a Cambridge-based software solutions provider, alongside existing investors, Nesta, Cambridge Angels and Cambridge Capital Group.
Mike Lynch, non-executive director of Featurespace and founder and ex-CEO of Autonomy, has also invested in this round.
Featurespace, co-founded by Professor Bill Fitzgerald and David Excell, has commercialised innovative technology that processes streams of data and builds predictive models to identify and influence change in customer behaviour, based on their world-leading research carried out at Cambridge University. Featurespace is applying its technology to fraud detection and marketing analytics.
The fraud detection software provides customers with greater accuracy in identifying genuine risks to their business and a significant reduction in the number of false positive alerts, allowing a greater proportion of business to be accepted safely.
The marketing analytics software assesses the behaviour of on-line customers and predicts the likelihood they will churn, enabling marketers to analyse individual customer behaviour in real-time and take appropriate action to reduce churn, as well as increase revenue.
Featurespace’s technology has the potential to be adopted widely across the $10bn business intelligence market which is growing at 13.4% p.a. and the fraud detection market worth $270m with a 13.4% growth rate p.a. (Gartner, 2010). It already has a number of large customers, including Betfair, one of the world's largest international online sports betting providers, and IG Group, a world leader in financial derivatives trading.
Featurespace will use the funds raised to further develop its software, build its team and drive sales.
Innovations invested £750,000 in this round. Jon Edington, Director of Technology Ventures at Innovations, will join the board of Featurespace.
Susan Searle, Chief Executive Officer, Imperial Innovations, said:
“This is our second investment in a Cambridge technology company and is an exciting opportunity to back Professor Bill Fitzgerald, a proven expert in this field. The strength of the investment syndicate is a great endorsement of Featurespace’s technology and the management team.”
David Excell, Chief Executive Officer, Featurespace, said:
“We are already gaining good customer traction with our technology, and this investment enables us to further build our team and sales capability to support our growing business through the next stage of our development.”