Ares Intelligence, an AI interviewer that asks every employee in a business where AI could help, has raised £2.5 million. Creandum and Lakestar backed the round, with participation from angel investors from Google DeepMind.
Most AI strategy is written by a small group of senior leaders, while the people closest to the work are rarely asked where time is lost. Ares holds confidential, voice-based conversations with every employee in an organisation, in more than 70 languages. Within weeks, leadership receives a prioritised, evidence-led roadmap showing where AI can save time and money. Those interviews surface the manual workarounds, broken handoffs and unapproved AI tools that rarely reach the boardroom. The platform is GDPR- and SOC 2-compliant, with anonymisation controls, and can run on a customer's own cloud or on Ares's infrastructure in the EU or US.
Matt Falconer, CEO, and Alfie Ranstead, CTO, co-founded the business after seeing the problem first-hand at their previous automation company, Instruct. Customers there wanted to automate parts of their operations but didn't know where to begin. In the seven months since launch, Ares has signed enterprise customers across Europe and the United States. Tremonia, a Mercedes-Benz spin-out, uncovered more than 400 hours of avoidable manual work per month within four weeks of Ares interviewing staff from senior leadership down to the paint shop floor. The funding will be used to expand and bring Ares to more businesses.
Businesses across Europe know they need to adopt AI, but many still don’t know where to start. It’s vital that companies begin their AI transformations now to avoid falling behind. The people doing the work every day have a huge amount of knowledge about where AI could make a difference, but they’re rarely asked. Ares gives them a voice across departments, countries and languages, and turns what they share into a practical plan. This funding helps us expand and bring that approach to more businesses.
Model capability isn’t what’s holding companies back. It’s knowing which use cases will actually deliver a return, and then putting them into practice. The Ares Intelligence team has seen that pain from both sides of the table, first at Automation Anywhere and then building their own solution with Instruct. Now they’re going after the biggest prize of all: uncovering automation potential where none was possible before. That’s why we’re backing them.
The gap between AI ambition and real-world evidence is the right challenge to back. I’m building a business with AI myself, and there’s a significant difference between an impressive demo and something you can rely on in your actual work. Matt and Alfie are building around a clear customer problem, with a specific way to uncover it and a focus on results. As an investor, that’s more compelling than another broad promise about AI.
