i3 - November/December 2020 - 11

By Angela Titone

Tech

I N T E R N AT I O N A L FO C US

UNITED KINGDOM

UK's
Independent
Answer to
Search

Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of Caper, Peter Hermes Furian/Alamy, Michael
Dziedzic/Unsplash, Courtesy of Mojeek, Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images.

Interactive App Takes
Kids off the Screen
Caper is a U.K.-based startup
that offers an app of speciallytailored adventures that families can enjoy together - inside
or outside. The app is designed
to get kids' bodies and minds
engaged in play through storyled missions that only start on
the smartphone. Caper,
founded in 2020, aims for 20%
screen time and 80% playtime.
Creative activities include hunting for bugs, building a fort
inside, or finding an imaginary
crashed spaceship. Caper is
out to disrupt the idea that
smartphone games are a
sedentary, solitary pleasure.
LEGO Ventures, with participation from Founders Factory,
announced a seed investment
round of some €300K.

UK IS ON THE MONEY

Investment in Britain's tech sector rose 44% to a record
$13.2 billion pounds last year, while the total amount of
capital invested in tech startups in many other top
countries fell, reported the U.K. government's Digital
Economy Council. BusinessFinancing.co.uk analyzed
10,000 FinTech, or financial technology companies,
and found the U.K. has the next highest number of
startups - 482 - attracting $18.7 billion in funding,
ranking it tops in Europe. London alone has 45 unicorns (defined as startups worth at least $1 billion). The
eight British companies that reached unicorn status in
2019 were Rapyd, CMR Surgical, Babylon Health,
Sumup, Trainline, Acuris, Checkout.com and OVO
Energy, taking the total created in the U.K. to 77. And
the technology isn't just about the hardware. The U.K. is
the world's fifth largest exporter of tech services, according to Tech Nation's 2020 Unlocking Global Tech report.

When it started in 2009, Mojeek
prided itself in being the first
search engine that didn't track
its users, including IP
addresses, click behavior or
search history. It remains the
only British built crawler-based
search engine to index over a
billion pages. Rather than rely
on indexes built by other search
engines, it uses its own. One of
its newest features is an emotion-based search that scores
against five emotions - love,
laughter, surprise, sadness and
anger. Mojeek's servers are
hosted at the U.K.'s greenest
data center, Custodian, also a
matter of pride.

AI to Find the Cure
British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) opened a $13 million-plus artificial
intelligence (AI) research hub in London to try to find new treatments for cancer and other
diseases. GSK employs some 80 AI experts globally. The site's 30 engineers and scientists will
research gene-related disease causes and work on AI-related drug discovery through partnerships with the nearby Alan Turing Institute, as well as tech companies NVIDIA and Cerebras.
The GSK site is located in King's Cross, a hub for other tech and data startups. The AI hotspot
is already home to Google's DeepMind, formed back in 2010 to explore AI.
C TA . t e c h / i 3

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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020

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https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foundersfactory.caperole&hl=en_US&gl=US http://BusinessFinancing.co.uk http://www.Checkout.com http://mojeek.com https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/ http://cta.tech/i3

i3 - November/December 2020

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