UK-based mobility software developer Immense Simulations has secured US$4.6m in Series A funding that will aid the continued growth and development of its AI-driven ‘Simulation as a Service’ platform, which is disrupting traditional transportation modelling systems.
Led by an award-winning team of developers, Immense was founded in 2016 as a spin-out from the UK government’s Future Cities and Transport Systems Catapult programs. The company’s platform uses simulation and AI (artificial intelligence) to revolutionize how transport stakeholders make decisions about the movement of people and goods. Immense provides highly-detailed, agent-based simulations of travelers, places, and mobility systems that enable rapid operational understanding of how a city moves. It facilitates experimentation with service deployments when integrating new technology and business models to a transport system.
The platform’s enhanced decision-making capabilities, strategically and operationally, drive down costs, and increase efficiencies for public authorities and mobility service providers. Simulation-based planning will help cities and autonomous vehicle operators manage the challenges of connected, shared and electrified transport. Immense has proven the transferability of these methods with early clients in the UK, Europe and North America. The new Series A funding was co-led by global technology investor, Amadeus Capital Partners, one of Europe’s most active AI investors according to Pitchbook, and Global Brain Corporation, one of the largest Japanese technology venture capital investment firms. Further investment was made by 31 Ventures, part of the Mitsui Fudosan Group.
“Mobility is changing fast, but transport decision-making is slow and expensive, based on poor data. Cities need to accommodate growth, improve resilience and serve an ageing population while improving accessibility, air quality and energy consumption,” noted Robin North, Immense’s co-founder and CEO. “Operators are facing increasingly low margins and both market and technology disruption, and consumers are expecting an ever more seamless service. This is a large-scale system problem that requires digital transformation to integrate siloed assets and empower effective decision-making. We are challenging these outdated methods through our cutting-edge, cloud-hosted simulation platform. With the backing of investors such as Amadeus with expertise in the mobility software sector, and the international perspective of Global Brain, we can capture the growing market for intelligent transport solutions.”
Amelia Armour, principal at Amadeus Capital Partners, said, “We’ve reached an inflexion point for transport technology, with machine learning and simulation software providing radical new opportunities for planners and providers. Anyone who’s driven home after a bank holiday weekend, with over 15 million cars and 70,000 incidents on the road, can see the potential benefit of the Immense platform. By testing and simulating traffic, public agencies can plan and manage road use more effectively, allowing them to mitigate delays and reduce travel time.”
Naoki Kamimaeda, partner at Global Brain, added, “We see huge potential in Immense Simulations to disrupt the existing solutions on the market and transform how the industry works on simulation-related projects. Smart transportation-related companies will definitely benefit from using Immense technologies and eventually it will make our society more efficient, comfortable and safe by reducing congestion and accidents and enhancing urban planning.”
