Better Futures Shortlisted for 2024 Irish Times Innovation Awards
- AI focused start-up shortlisted in the design and manufacturing category
Better Futures, an artificial intelligence (AI) focused start-up, has today been announced as a finalist in the design and manufacturing category of The Irish Times Innovation Awards 2024.
Earlier this year the company began the roll-out of EVATM, a novel AI Assistant Platform for engineers and manufacturers which leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with engineering accuracy and control.
EVATM (Engineering Verification Assistant) enables engineers to increase efficiency by up to 40%, with instant engineering knowledge retrieval in addition to the automation of creating, checking and updating of documents.
Better Futures, headquartered at NovaUCD in Dublin, was founded in 2023 by Anthony Mc Loughlin.
Anthony Mc Loughlin, CEO and founder, Better Futures, said, “It is a great honour for the entire Better Futures team to have been shortlisted for the prestigious Irish Times Innovation Awards.”
He added, “More importantly it helps to get our message out to engineers. The GPT breakthrough is revolutionary for their daily work, as it enables up to 80% automation of ‘paperwork’ and ‘knowledge administration’. We believe this is a generational opportunity to free engineers so they can focus on innovation, and on building better futures for their industries and our world. With EVATM we are building a dedicated solution for engineers to help unlock this AI breakthrough within their complex engineering environments.”
He concluded, “We believe we have made a great start this year and are grateful that this has been recognised by the Irish Times Innovation Awards, we look forward now to the Awards ceremony final later this month.”
Better Futures, which has already secured clients in Europe and the US, is currently closing a seed funding round having secured €500k in pre-seed funding earlier this year.
The Irish Times Innovation Awards aim to recognise and promote the best service, product, or operational innovations throughout the island. The finalists were selected by an independent panel of judges to secure a place at the final and a chance to win the overall ‘Innovation of the Year’ Award.
Along with the prestige of winning, the overall winner will receive a UCD Smurfit Executive Development scholarship for three from a selection of their Executive Development short courses commencing in 2024/2025 Academic Year. The winner will also receive a complimentary annual Premium Digital subscription to The Irish Times.
Better Futures will be competing against two other finalists, TurboTEM and Viska Systems, in their Award category.
Another NovaUCD-headquartered start-up Skippio, which has developed an innovative platform to enhance the fan experience at large-scale venues and events, has also been shortlisted for the Awards, in the IT and Fintech category.
In addition, Trojan Track, which is developing an automated, non-invasive solution that uses AI-based video analysis to spot early signs of lameness in horses, has been shortlisted in the Life Sciences and Healthcare category. Earlier this year Trojan Track completed the third AgTechUCD Agccelerator Programme at the AgTechUCD Innovation Centre at UCD Lyons Farm.
The winners of the competition will be announced at an Awards ceremony to be held in Dublin on 13 November.
For further information about The Irish Times Innovation Awards and this year’s shortlisted finalists visit www.irishtimes.com/innovationawards
ENDS
7 November 2024
For further information contact Micéal Whelan, Communications and Media Relations Manager, UCD Research and Innovation, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie or Anthony Mc Loughlin, e: anthony@betterfutures.ai.
Editors Notes
Better Futures believes the physical world is our home and future. We believe that digitalisation and AI should be a means, not an end, to improve our physical world. We need better cleaner cars to bring us together, rather than the metaverse to keep us apart, we need cleaner energy solutions rather than more micro trading, we need to thus empower engineers and manufactures with AI, so they can build a better physical world and future. https://www.betterfutures.ai/