Intelligent Core raises £2m to predict industrial failures with AI and sensors
This article covers Intelligent Core, a SaaS startup, which has secured £2m in fresh funding to accelerate development of its AI platform and proprietary sensor hardware for industrial monitoring. The funding is intended to support development and wider deployments of its AI and sensor offering for industrial operators in energy, oil and gas, water, manufacturing and transport, aiming to improve predictive monitoring and operational efficiency.
Intelligent Core, a SaaS startup, says it has secured fresh funding to accelerate development of its AI platform and sensor hardware for industrial monitoring. The company positions its technology as a way for operators in energy, oil and gas, water, manufacturing and transport to move from slow, reactive systems to faster, predictive decision-making — a transition its backers argue is becoming more urgent as costs and sustainability pressures rise.
Why it matters
Industrial operators still rely heavily on legacy systems and episodic inspections, which limits visibility across distributed assets and delays responses to equipment failures. Intelligent Core’s offering addresses that gap by combining continuous data capture with AI-driven forecasting and automation.
The company claims its platform can cut operational costs by up to 80% and deliver actions in milliseconds rather than hours or days. It also says it can provide sub-surface infrastructure monitoring using proprietary, patented sensor technology — a capability that can be particularly relevant for utilities and transport operators working with buried assets.
Those outcomes are significant for UK and European infrastructure owners facing rising energy costs, tighter regulatory and sustainability requirements, and the need to reduce downtime while improving safety.
Inside the product
Intelligent Core’s product is built as a modular AI platform plus integrated hardware. Key elements described by the company include:
- Data ingestion and unification from equipment, sensors and field operations.
- Forecasting and analytics that run in the cloud, on-premises or at the edge.
- Autonomous decisioning that can trigger actions close to where operations occur.
- Proprietary sensor hardware designed to collect data in remote or subsurface environments.
The company markets the stack as suitable for mission-critical, distributed environments where connectivity is intermittent and where collecting high-quality data has historically been a barrier to meaningful AI deployment. It intends the modular approach to support large-scale customer deployments and to work with existing industrial systems.
Who are the investors?
Intelligent Core has raised £2m in the latest round. The company says the round was led by Fuel Ventures, with additional investment from Plug & Play Tech Center and Helion Partners. This follows an earlier £500k funding round raised by the company earlier this year.
The stated use of proceeds includes expanding the team, advancing hardware development and delivering larger customer projects across global markets.
In the announcement, Mark Pearson, Founding Partner at Fuel Ventures, said:
Since initially investing in Intelligent Core earlier this year, we’ve been impressed by the momentum they’ve built and the speed at which they are reshaping industrial operations with real-time, autonomous AI. We’re strong believers in the power of AI, and Intelligent Core is an excellent example of real-world AI deployment at scale. The team is solving challenges that have held major industries back for decades, and their technology has the potential to redefine how critical infrastructure runs. We’re thrilled to support them at this stage and look forward to backing their rapid growth in the journey ahead.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Tom Greenlees, CEO at Intelligent Core, said:
Industrial organisations are under pressure to run more efficiently, safely and sustainably - but the reality is that most are still limited by outdated tools and legacy systems that simply can’t keep up. We built Intelligent Core to give organisations real operational intelligence - live, predictive, and autonomous - no matter how remote, complex, or distributed their operations are. In heavy industry, data is often the biggest roadblock to meaningful AI deployment, and that’s exactly why we’ve developed proprietary hardware that allows us to collect the critical data ourselves and deliver results rapidly.
Greenlees frames the product as a response to a practical barrier: many industrial AI programmes fail to get traction because the necessary data is not available or trustworthy. The addition of hardware to a primarily software-led offering is positioned as a way to address that gap.
The bigger picture
The deal sits at the intersection of a few broader trends in the UK and European tech ecosystem: growing interest in industrial AI, the move to edge-native applications for critical infrastructure, and investor appetite for solutions that combine software with domain-specific hardware. For operators, the pressure to improve efficiency and reduce emissions is prompting more experimentation with real-time monitoring and automation.
Whether Intelligent Core can convert pilot projects into repeatable, large-scale deployments will be one measure of how viable the hybrid hardware-plus-SaaS model is for heavy industry. The company’s claim around subsurface monitoring and its current sector focus make it a relevant example of how startups are attempting to modernise long-lived infrastructure across the region.
The funding round underlines continued investor attention on industrial digitalisation across the UK and Europe as operators seek ways to make ageing networks more resilient and more sustainable.
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