CEO and founder Anthony Mc Loughlin. Image: Better Futures
Founded last year, the NovaUCD-based start-up raised €500,000 in a pre-seed round last month to deploy its SaaS platform across Ireland, Germany and the UK.
“The physical world is our home and future. We believe that digitalisation and AI should be a means, not an end, to improve our physical world,” says Anthony Mc Loughlin.
“We need better, cleaner cars to bring us together, rather than the metaverse to keep us apart. We need cleaner energy solutions rather than more micro trading … we need to thus empower engineers and manufactures with AI so they can build a better physical world and future.”
Mc Loughlin is the founder and CEO of Dublin-based Better Futures, established last year to address the low adoption of AI in manufacturing. In the US, for example, less than 4pc of manufacturers use AI to produce goods and services as per census data from last November.
“It is too expensive and too complex,” Mc Loughlin continues. “The result is that the promise of AI is reserved only to the 4pc, usually IT departments within OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] with enough budget, resources and access to siloed knowledge.”
Now, with rapid advancement in artificial intelligence technologies and the rise of large language models, Mc Loughlin believes the problem has an efficient fix.
Better Futures, which started operations in January, is building a dedicated platform for manufacturers and engineers to adopt AI with the promise of up to 10-fold reduction in lead time, cost and risk.
“We give the power of AI into the hands of those who need it most: manufacturing operators, engineers, innovation leaders, methods and tools teams. Our first customers are able to identify, deploy and govern first AI use cases within weeks – soon within days – and we are working on a subset of use cases which will be in real time.”
Going big, going fast
A mechanical engineer by background, Mc Loughlin has 15 years of experience across a range of sectors, including business development, data science and even rocket science. He has helped leading manufacturers such as Airbus, Mercedes and Rolls Royce adopt generative design, advanced analytics and AI in their businesses and held executive positions at AI software companies such as Altair RapidMiner and Databricks.
But now, Better Futures has his full time and attention. Based at NovaUCD, he is hoping to reach millions of engineers across the globe with the SaaS platform that has generative AI at its core.
“This [generative AI] enables us to deploy fundamentally new AI use cases at lightning speed and the ability to systematically and successfully deploy more traditional data analytics use cases such as predictive maintenance,” he says.
“With AI, we envision a future where engineers spend 80pc of their time truly innovating, with the knowledge of 1m experts at the press of a button. Today that number is about 20pc.”
Just last month, Better Futures secured €500,000 in a pre-seed funding round backed by unnamed angel investors to help roll out its flagship Eva platform across its initial target markets of Ireland, Germany and the UK.
The company is now on the search for a chief technology officer to join its team of four that has, in this short time, been able to bag clients from micro-SMEs to Fortune 100 companies in multiple countries.
“I am so proud of how far we have come with such little resources and the clarity we have on the way forward,” Mc Loughlin says. “Plan A is go big, go fast – so we are targeting a seven-figure seed round in the next 6-8 months. We have had quite a lot of VCs reach out to us in the last weeks and from first discussions we feel our timeline is realistic.”
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