The Sovereign AI Fund is investing in Augur: a British startup building AI software that keeps public spaces and critical infrastructure safe

Today we are announcing our investment in Augur, a UK sovereign software analytics platform built to protect people in the places they live, work, travel and gather. Augur helps to transform the capability of legacy sensing infrastructure to be able to quickly detect, prevent and investigate threats and incidents to public safety.

A core focus for the company will be to make Britain’s critical national infrastructure more resilient to the growing threats it faces on an almost daily basis. This is infrastructure that underpins our everyday lives – the energy, water, communications and transport networks we depend on without thinking about them. This makes them high-value targets for Britain’s adversaries. Despite the UK having one of the most extensive security networks in the world, the use of technology such as Augur helps to transform our existing capabilities and help stay ahead of our adversaries.

The platform has built world leading detection and tracking capability to change how these systems are able to understand how people and objects move in space. Using AI and machine learning, Augur can seamlessly detect anomalous behaviour and track incidents across multiple sensors, reconstructing them in seconds and allowing operators to intercept a potential threat before it ever has a chance to cause harm. The technology is designed with privacy at its core and the platform is built from the ground up in compliance with UK GDPR and the EU AI Act.

Integrating with legacy infrastructure means Augur can support operators quickly, without the need to replace expensive cameras and sensors. The platform is also designed to be intuitive, adaptable and to support the end users specific requirements. Most importantly, Augur never makes the final decision, but rather surfaces key information for operators to assess and act on. It’s goal is to empower the human in the loop, not replace them. 

The platform is already being developed for real-world public safety applications. In partnership with Transport for London, Augur is researching how its technology could help detect sexual offences and harassment against women and girls on the London bus network. 

Augur ML engineers will work with TfL to research and identify types of sexual offending and explore how it could help with early intervention and evidence gathering.

Other planned applications of the technology apply across public safety and national security, from helping police trace the movements of an abducted child across multiple locations, keeping women and girls safe on public transport, to identifying potential acts of terrorism or sabotage before they occur. 

Alongside our investment, Sovereign AI is giving Augur access to Isambard-AI, the UK's most powerful AI supercomputer. Augur will use it to train on much larger and more complex multi-camera datasets, improving how its models interpret a scene as it moves across locations.

We are partnering with Augur because Britain needs this capability and should own it. The infrastructure is already here. The technology that helps keep us safe should be built here too, by a team that has shown that better security and privacy can go together.

We are delighted to be partnering with Harry, Imran, Stefan and the Augur team.