NOSIBLE, a nascent artificial intelligence company founded by a former head of data science at South African drone analytics firm Aerobotics, has announced it has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding. The investment, led by pan-African venture capital firm Atlantica Ventures, with participation from existing customers, will fuel the startup’s growth and go-to-market strategy.
Founded in 2020 by Stuart Reid, a computer scientist and quantitative analyst, NOSIBLE aims to become a leading AI provider for the asset management industry. Mr. Reid, who spent over a decade building large-scale AI systems at Aerobotics, identified a key challenge in existing AI technology alongside co-founder and founding engineer Matthew Dicks: the efficiency and cost of large-scale search.
The company claims to have developed a novel solution to the “approximate nearest neighbors” problem, a fundamental aspect of AI search. NOSIBLE’s technology is reportedly optimized for disk storage, supports pre-filtering, compression, streaming, and bulk querying, while also enabling real-time hyperparameter tuning. This combination, according to the company, results in a search capability that is 100 times cheaper than current state-of-the-art methods.
“Our discovery changes the AI equation,” said Mr. Reid, NOSIBLE’s chief executive. “Our index operates at 1/100th the cost of current methods and uniquely supports real-time hyperparameter tuning, allowing it to dynamically adapt to more complex searches.” He drew a parallel to OpenAI’s approach of increasing computational power during testing.
Ik Kanu, a founding partner at Atlantica Ventures, highlighted the team’s expertise as a key factor in their investment. “We invested in NOSIBLE because we saw a small, focused team that was deeply knowledgeable in quantitative finance, machine learning, and computer science, building their own infrastructure to power a low-cost, agentic platform with intelligent workflows,” he said. He added that the “unique blend of finance and tech expertise” allows NOSIBLE to offer specialized value to asset managers with notable capital efficiency.
Adding further weight to the startup’s ambitions, NOSIBLE has appointed Axel Hörger as an advisor. Mr. Hörger brings nearly three decades of experience in senior roles at major financial institutions, including Lombard International, UBS, and Goldman Sachs. His expertise in capital markets and digital transformation is expected to be crucial in accelerating NOSIBLE’s market penetration.
“NOSIBLE’s innovation unlocks exciting new opportunities by enabling AI agents to perform more searches, enhancing the depth and accuracy of their results,” commented Mr. Hörger. “The team has developed a technology with the potential to reshape AI analytics entirely.”
Alongside the funding announcement, NOSIBLE has launched nosible.ai, a platform showcasing its technology through “hyperspecialized AI agents.” Unlike general-purpose AI models, these agents are designed to excel at specific tasks within asset management, continuously improving through extensive search interactions.
NOSIBLE’s core proposition rests on the idea that increased search capabilities directly translate to smarter AI agents, enabling deeper and faster insights. The company claims its research agent, for example, can analyze data in minutes, a task that traditionally takes around 20 hours.
“nosible.ai agents empower asset managers to do the impossible,” concluded Mr. Reid. “With lower search costs, our agents can deliver unprecedented analytical depth.”
Founded in 2020, NOSIBLE offers a search engine API for businesses seeking real-time and historical data insights, alongside its consumer-facing nosible.ai platform aimed at streamlining asset management tasks. The pre-seed funding marks a significant step for the South African startup as it seeks to disrupt the AI landscape for the financial services sector.