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This AI Startup Could Be The Next DeepMind Posted on : Jul 16 - 2018

Most people find it a pain to receive parcels in wide time slots like, say, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., so when delivery startup Paack offered a service in which everyone could narrow that window down to one hour, with no extra charge, it had a challenge on its hands. The startup’s routing engine worked but needed to be more efficient.

Enter Prowler.io, a Cambridge, U.K.-based machine-learning startup that bills itself as a decision-making platform for any company with complex problems to solve.

Paack’s investors at Balderton in London introduced it to Prowler in February 2018, and within months its delivery vans and trucks were being coordinated by an intelligent, digital simulation.

With the beta test over, Paack’s CEO, Fernando Benito, sees a potential benefit to his bottom line. Some of his startup’s deliveries are now 15% more efficient, he tells Forbes.

“If we have a better forecast, we should improve our resource allocation,” he adds during a phone interview from his headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. “Margins should also increase.”

Prowler claims it can do a better job of seeing into the future than the majority of AI approaches, which rely on deep learning. The idea of machine learning often conjures the human brain, but Prowler’s founder, Vishal Chatrath, thinks that’s a silly way of building artificial intelligence.

He sees a future when decisions aren’t made by a central hub but by lots of intelligent agents that work and think together in a simulation.

To coordinate a fleet of self-driving taxis, for instance, a computer shouldn’t make decisions about where each taxi should go. Instead, it should simulate the entire environment and attach intelligence to the digital avatars of each taxi. The process is called multi-agent simulation.

The idea is a bit like viewing the world through a video game and letting the game and its characters form decisions about what should happen in the real world.

Prowler has been testing its platform with one other client, Mandatum Life, a life insurance company in Helsinki, Finland, and Chatrath says early results show it has helped that company improve its equity trading performance, too. View More