Today, London-based Cogna announced it has raised £3.76 million to transform how traditional industries solve unique, difficult problems.
Founded in 2023, Cogna is a SaaS company using AI to create highly customised software applications, selling them as a standard SaaS licence to numerous companies. Cogna’s AI-driven SaaS platform simplifies the integration of data across different business areas and gives domain experts the ability to create their own customised software tools in collaboration with AI – to drive analysis, optimisations and decisions that deliver vast improvements.
The company was founded in 2023 by Ben Peters and Lars Mennen. Peters was part of the team that founded FiveAI, the AI-powered self-driving car company that successfully exited to Bosch in 2022.
Ben Peters, CEO of Cogna, says:
“The problem is huge. Productivity growth in traditional industries has stagnated or declined over the last 15 years. This is important, as 70 per cent of Western economies are led by traditional industries such as manufacturing and civil engineering."
The approach of the last decades has been to bring in management consultants or buy off-the-shelf software. The gains from this approach have now been had. Industries such as civil engineering and manufacturing are ‘real life’ industries with highly heterogeneous problems.
While SaaS has been able to address common customer issues at scale, products have struggled to adapt to the diverse, specific processes inherent in these complex sectors.
"Moreover, the conventional software and management consultancy model is often too slow and costly to effectively address these unique challenges.”
The funding round was led by Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Notion Capital and Octopus First Cheque Fund, and a roster of angel investors including Stan Boland (Founder, Icera); Hermann Hauser (of Amadeus Capital Partners); Professor Neil Lawrence (DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, Cambridge); Zayd Enam and Tim Shi (Founders of Cresta); Ping Wu (CEO of Cresta); and Aviv Nevo, Nick Elliot (Helsing).
Bryan Gartner from Hoxton Ventures shared:
“For the first time, large multinational businesses do not have to force-fit, tweak and customise their own processes and workflows to operate in an off-the-shelf ERP software world.
With Cogna’s software-factory approach to defining problems and designing solutions, these same companies can instead utilise highly customised and personalised apps that are tailor-made for their own businesses' daily needs.
We firmly believe a large majority of the enterprise software stack will see a fundamental shift to these custom platforms and apps over the coming years.”
Customer Steve Hunt, Director of Commercial at Cadent Gas, says:
“Cogna's approach has been both supportive and transformative within our commercial team, enabling us to effortlessly compare supplier bids and analyse vital commercial data quickly and with precision.
Working with Cogna to optimise our annual gas mains replacement program and related activities not only ensures optimal outcomes, but also supports both Cadent and also our supply chain partners in achieving a level of pricing transparency that is truly beneficial.”
Cogna plans to grow its team further throughout 2024 and beyond, hiring the best talent to work on the world’s most important problems.
Lead image: Cogna. Photo: uncredited.
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