Transforming Industries with Automated Decision-Making at Scale

Rainbird is a unique automated decision-making platform that is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) but governed by human rules. The company enables any business to replicate and scale the high-value, complex reasoning capabilities of its subject matter experts, in order to make better, more consistent automated judgements.

The platform is built on four key pillars:

1. Built for Business: The Rainbird editor is designed for business people, not software engineers, putting SMEs at the heart of the process. The graphical knowledge capture interface is easy to get started with, can get up and run in minutes.

2. Open Architecture: Rainbird's open architecture enables quick, easy integration with existing data, existing systems and APIs on the public internet. Simple, REST-based APIs provide straight forward mechanisms to inject and retrieve data, and to manage conversations. These APIs mean Rainbird works well alongside other AI technologies.

3. Handles Uncertainty: Rainbird works in the face of uncertainty, be that uncertain rules, uncertain data, or uncertain answers from end-users. The runtime engine is able to make inference and continue even in the face of missing data.

4. Audited Decisions: Rainbird provides a rationale for decisions which serves as an audit for every judgement. Users are able to explore the whole chain of reasoning along with how the certainty of the final decision was determined. Audit trails are available through its open source graphical evidence tree rendering, as a JSON object via our APIs.

The Foundation of Rainbird

Before Rainbird, replicating human reasoning in software was extremely complex and prohibitively expensive. Co-founders Ben Taylor and James Duez realized that organizations in every sector would benefit from technology that could quickly replicate and scale human reasoning within their operations – it would enable them to increase the accuracy and consistency of their decisions while reducing operational costs. This led to the genesis of Rainbird's automated decision-making platform. Now, with Rainbird, any organisation can cost-effectively synthesise and scale best-practice decision-making and access the rationale behind those decisions via an in-built audit trail, which makes it ideally suited to any regulated industry. The company has already disrupted industries via projects in finance, banking, automotive, health, retail, and law.

Rainbird was founded in Norwich in 2013 and has since then expanded to London and beyond with partners and clients that include household multinational brands across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia.

Meet the Insightful Leaders

An authority on artificial intelligence – with an encyclopedic knowledge of both its past and present – Rainbird CEO Ben Taylor is passionate about solving complex challenges through the use of innovative technologies. Earlier in his career, while Director of Technology at a motor insurance startup, he led the technical development of an award-winning AI system that revolutionised the motor insurance industry. Ben is the driving force behind Rainbird's fusion of human expertise and automated decision-making. He holds a degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Sussex and is an active member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence (APPG AI).

Ben's co-founder, Rainbird Chairman James Duez, is an experienced entrepreneur and prolific investor who has co-founded and exited a number of highly successful and disruptive tech companies over the last 20 years. His portfolio includes working with both Global 250 and Global 500 organisations, as well as servicing state departments both domestic and international, such as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the US Department of Defense (DoD).

A fountain of business knowledge and an accomplished technology innovator, James has led strategy and operations, software engineering and business development functions in a wide variety of industries.

Revolutionizing AI-Powered Decision-Making

By encoding human expertise and applying it at scale, Rainbird is a pioneer in the field of AI. The limitations with most AI technologies has always been that the "if-then" logic of RPA systems can only automate simple tasks. This is why, if companies expect a human-like level of intelligence from AI, they need to invest in technology that can be configured using their own expertise, rather than mining masses of data or operating on vast decision tree structures.

Those that do are seeing the benefits in a range of industries, for example in the UK motor insurance industry, where Rainbird is helping insurers and third-party representatives make better accident liability decisions.

Elsewhere, the company's platform is being used by credit card providers to identify fraudulent transactions when they're processing over half a million transactions per minute. Rainbird has been able to automate 85% of all cases, increase detection rates, and achieve a 60% reduction in back-office fraud processing costs for one customer.

Innovation Through Disruption

What makes Rainbird so innovative is that the company is disrupting how traditional decision-making is made within business. Not only Rainbird has made it possible for any organisation to synthesise best-practice decision-making and make it available at scale, it has also made it possible for companies to see how the certainty of the final decision was determined. It's game-changing.

Rainbird's most innovative projects include AiX, which pioneers a virtual inter-dealer broker – the first of its kind in the trading industry and designed to facilitate easier cryptocurrency trading. Rainbird powers the AiX trading tool to automatically review trade offerings, compare them against the market, and conduct multiple marketplace conversations simultaneously – all while providing an audit trail, which is particularly important in such a closely regulated industry.

Awards and Recognitions

Rainbird has been recognised as a major innovator by a number of high profile awards and publications. Last year, the company was announced as East of England winner at Barclays High-Growth and Entrepreneur Awards. Rainbird is also recognised as one of the UK's Top 50 Digital Innovators by CityAM. More recently the company has been selected as part of Tech City's Upscale 2018 programme, as well as SwiftScale's Winter '17 Cohort for fast-growing scaleups.

Turning Challenges into Opportunities

 Commenting on the challenges, Ben said, "Adapting to fast growth is a challenge for any company. Ensuring we're client value focused and maintaining our core identity, while continuing to grow with a team of more than 30 and several suppliers and partners has been an exciting challenge. We have an expanding London office working in tandem with our thriving Norwich headquarters. Our next challenge: global expansion!"

The Road Ahead

 As automation continues to rise in stature in the business world, and as RPA continues to show its limitations, it's clear that Rainbird's automated decision-making platform is becoming a smart strategic choice. Rainbird undoubtedly heralds a step change for any enterprise choosing to take advantage of its capabilities. And with new data legislation, such as GDPR, Rainbird will help companies meet compliance targets – particularly in regulated industries like finance, insurance and legal. At the current moment in time, this is where the company's focus lies.

Looking to the future, Rainbird aims to better serve its growing international customer base by growing the company's network of partners. These include Heron, a wholly owned London-based AI consulting and solutions company, Hong Kong-based JOS Group, covering Asia plus a string of partners soon to be announced in North America and Europe.

Meanwhile, Rainbird's research and development team are working on materializing the next generation of innovation and expect to announce a string of patent applications later this year.