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A Manchester-based AI software provider has secured a $3m investment led by two venture capital firms in London and a listed asset manager.

Mindtrace will use the funding from Skylake Capital, Bloc Ventures and existing investor Mercia Asset Management to accelerate its product roadmap and bolster go-to market capabilities, including strategic partnerships.

As a result of the investment Marcos Battisti, general partner at Skylake Capital, and Michael Dimelow, chief commercial officer at Bloc Ventures, have joined the company's board of directors.

Mr Battisti said: "Mindtrace is a true innovator in a rapidly emerging new market dynamic. The company has developed a platform offering a unique combination of capabilities which include few-shot learning and federated learning.

"These capabilities are crucial to the democratization of artificial intelligence (AI). The solution is also a key technology to enable new AI capabilities at the edge."

Mindtrace's chairman Sir Hossein Yassaie added: "Deployment of continuous learning AI technology, capable of learning on multiple platforms and sharing new use case knowledge across enterprise and partner networks, with minimal data labeling and AI model rebuilding requirement, is a major advantage for enterprises to embrace in order to remain competitive in the age of digital transformation."

Ashwin Kumaraswamy, investment director at Mercia, said: "As Mindtrace’s seed investor we are delighted to take part in this latest round welcoming two new partners to the syndicate, both of whom have significant value to add.

"AI is a hugely important sector to Mercia, Mindtrace is a great example which is bringing a novel brain inspired AI technology platform to make machines dynamically think and learn continuously in a human like manner."

Mr Dimelow added: "Venture capital and the technology titans have poured billions into AI over the past decade or so, driven by innovators that are seeking out ways to help humans make better decisions or automate repetitive tasks.

"We are now entering an era of AI where teaching computers to learn and cognitively process like a human is the next logical step on the world’s technology roadmap.

"Mindtrace has been working on this challenge for over five years, so we’re thrilled to partner with the team and to see whether they can make unsupervised learning a reality."

Hoon Chung, chief executive of Mindtrace, added: "This novel technology enables a set of new possibilities that minimizes the need for large amounts of labeled data and allows for faster learning and more intelligent AI that adapts to changing real-life conditions.

"We are excited to work with Skylake Capital and Bloc Ventures as our global partners for growth."