Accenture is acquiring Mudano, a data consultancy with customers primarily in the financial services industry, headquartered in London.

The company develops and implements a platform that captures project data – such as daily tasks, meeting notes, resource information and progress reports – and uses machine learning to predict the path of a project.

According to Mudano, this approach can help foresee issues, improve productivity and deliver projects more efficiently.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Update: The Sharktower software, developed by the startup, will carry on as a separate business.

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Mudano has been working to put artificial intelligence in service of better project outcomes since 2014. It develops a proprietary platform called Sharktower, serving as a front-end for its project optimization efforts.

The company can help with data strategy, data analytics and applied machine learning, placing it somewhere in the middle between a software firm, a data science lab and a consultancy.

Mudano has trademarked its approach as “Delivery Science” and says it has been running complex change programs and portfolios with budgets exceeding £100m.

According to FutureScot, the startup received a £2.6m research and development grant from the Scottish government in 2018, after it agreed to open an R&D facility in Edinburgh.

Following the acquisition, Mudano’s staff will join Accenture’s 20,000-strong Applied Intelligence division, where they will help clients in the financial services sector scale their AI efforts.

However Applied Intelligence is not interested in selling software, so Sharktower will continue to exist as a separate business.

“The Sharktower business is not a part of the agreed acquisition and will continue to develop its AI-driven project and portfolio management technology,” George Marcotte, managing director responsible for the Applied Intelligence group in the UK and Ireland, told AI Business.

“Sharktower is still available for purchase with a range of enterprise pricing models and extensive support for all customers.”

Accenture launched Applied Intelligence in February 2019, looking to combine its expertise across artificial intelligence, data management, analytics and automation. The division has since absorbed AI firms Clarity Insights, Pragsis Bidoop and Analytics8, and now employs a total of 6,000 data scientists, data engineers and AI professionals.

“Mudano’s focus on helping clients build a ‘data culture’ aligns perfectly to Accenture’s applied intelligence strategy,” Marcotte said. “By creating a strong data foundation — supported by the right skills, stakeholders and technologies — our clients can transform at speed and scale and fuel real change for their business.”

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Waymo, Google’s self-driving car sibling company, has acquired the Oxford artificial intelligence company Latent Logic for an undisclosed amount, giving Waymo its first presence in the UK.

Latent Logic, a spinout company from Oxford University, specialises in “imitation learning”, teaching machines how to act by showing them examples of humans doing the same actions. It was founded in 2017 by the academics Shimon Whiteson and João Messias.

Waymo hopes the company’s expertise can be put to use teaching AI drivers how to deal with complex behaviour such as a car cutting off another at a roundabout, a pedestrian emerging from a parked car, or a cyclist skidding in rain.

“The team’s expertise in reinforcement learning and imitation learning can help further accelerate Waymo’s progress in areas from simulation to behaviour prediction and planning,” the company said in a statement.

The Alphabet subsidiary is also intending to use its new base in Oxford to build a second pool of AI talent outside its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The UK is a world leader in AI research, including autonomous vehicles, and many talented researchers will not or cannot relocate to the US – no matter how deep the recruiter’s pockets.

Drago Anguelov, Waymo’s principal scientist and head of research, said: “We see an exciting opportunity in Europe, not only in continuing to build our partnerships with major automakers but also in benefitting from the world-class technology and engineering capabilities in Oxford and beyond.”

Whiteson, who will continue to work as a professor of computer science at Oxford, added: “By joining Waymo, we are taking a big leap towards realising our ambition of safe, self-driving vehicles. In just two years, we have made significant progress in using imitation learning to simulate real human behaviours on the road. I’m excited by what we can now achieve in combining this expertise with the talent, resources and progress Waymo have already made in self-driving technology.”

The acquisition is about research only, however: for the time being, Waymo has no plans to launch its self-driving taxis in the UK. Those remain strictly active only in Phoenix, Arizona, where they have recently begun to operate in a fully driverless manner, ferrying paying passengers around the city without even a human safety driver in the front seat.

The company does plan to operate in Europe in the near future, however, working with Renault to develop a self-driving taxi service for the 2024 Paris Olympics, when it hopes to be able to shuttle travellers from Charles de Gaulle airport to La Défense.

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