• Astroscreen

  Led · Equity · Apr 2019

  Astroscreen combines machine-learning models with human disinformation analysts to monitor social networks for contextual anomalies and coordinated campaigns. Its techniques include coordinated activity detection, linguistic fingerprinting, and fake account and botnet detection. The platform alerts brands when they are under attack at early stages, giving them time to mitigate reputational harm. The company has secured $1 million in initial funding to progress its technology. Astroscreen positions itself as complementary to platform-level defenses by focusing on topic-specific anomalous behavior rather than only collective anomalies. Its leadership includes CEO Ali Tehrani, who previously sold a machine-learning news analytics company in 2015, and CTO Juan Echeverria, whose UCL PhD focused on fake account detection and who uncovered a large Twitter botnet.

• Liopa

  Participated · Seed · Apr 2018

  Liopa is a Belfast startup spun out of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen’s University after ten years of research. Its core product, LipRead, is described as the first-ever Visual Speech Recognition platform to go online and uses device cameras to analyse lip movement and decipher words and phrases. The company plans to commercialise and bring LipRead to market to improve accuracy of voice-driven assistants in noisy environments such as vehicles, offices and factories. LipRead will be multilingual and potential uses include automated subtitling for the hard of hearing, word/phrase search in uploaded video, human-robotic interaction, and preventing authentication fraud (anti-spoofing). The team includes entrepreneurs Liam McQuillan and Richard McConnell and scientists Dr Darryl Stewart and Dr Fabian Campbell-West. Financially, Liopa has secured $1m in seed funding to support commercialisation.

No current team members are available.