MeVitae

Route to Impact

MeVitae, founded by two Oxford University Alums, is a tech company aimed at solving the biggest recruitment challenges. Using AI and big data technology, the team have developed clever algorithms that match candidates to jobs, personalised to every company’s needs. Their deep-tech HR solution helps companies shortlist top, diverse talent by removing unconscious bias. This is achieved through a powerful anonymisation API and tool that scientifically detects and corrects for unconscious bias without losing text context. It is 90% faster than manual processes and takes blind recruiting to the next level.

The team have spent several years building cutting-edge data-driven cognitive solutions to put advanced decision-making at their clients and partners fingertips. By unearthing the perfect candidate in terms of fit to company culture, technical ability and personal skills, it is possible to create a talented, diverse workforce. For example: in the MeVitae blind audition process the likelihood of a woman being hired increases by up to 46%.

“This collaboration has shown the potential of our technology in a new market sector and has yielded superb results. We will definitely work with the Catapult again”

Riham Satti – Co-Founder & CEO, MeVitae

The Solution

Satellite Applications Catapult received £2k of funding through European Space Agency BIC to build a financial model for MeVitae in support of their funding round. This crucial piece of work provided credibility when speaking to investors. To date MeVitae have received £500k of equity funding from a large consortium of investors which includes Dhiraj Mukherjee, co-founder of Shazam.

Whilst MeVitae initially focused in the HR/recruitment sector they have sought ways to deploy their existing technology into the space/satellite industry, to widen market share and growth opportunity for the business.

The Satellite ACE (Access for Everyone) project created the opportunity for MeVitae to make this transition. The utilisation of adjacent technologies (semantic searching and space) are too risky for industry to undertake alone, this project allowed us to de-risk this technology cross-pollination. By updating the Catapult’s existing Data Discovery Hub to provide a greater range of datasets and importantly, to allow non-specialist users to access and search the most relevant satellite datasets, based on specific user criteria.

The Data Discovery Hub is market agnostic; thus, it can be used across many different areas from Agriculture to mining to maritime etc. With users having the ability to search using natural language there is an almost infinite number of markets this would be relevant to.

The project objective was to focus on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and custom-built techniques similar to Word2Vec, computational linguistics tool to develop an intelligent multi-dimensional and semantic query for the Data Discovery Hub. This included:

• A Platform Update: To refresh the user interface and develop a ‘clean’ design, focused on clear and well-presented information.
• Adding datasets and links: The original hub had a total of 40 links to satellite data providers – The new hub has 130 links.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) Search Integration – Mevitae’s NLP platform provided a powerful way to allow specific search terms to generate precise results. Thus, giving a broader audience the chance to utilise Earth Observation data and understand the potential benefits of its use.

The main objectives of the project were realised, and both teams benefited from the exchange of knowledge and upskilling of staff throughout this collaboration.

Outcomes

• Mevitae’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform helped enhance our Data Discovery Hub expanding their market, this led to £1.5m of investment for additional projects in the space sector.
• MeVitae, a University of Oxford spin-out, used AI technology to develop a HR solution to help companies shortlist top talent by removing unconscious bias, 90% faster than manual processes.
• Working with the Catapult, Mevitae helped to enhance our Data Discovery Hub, from 40 to 130 earth observation datasets, giving MeVitae an opportunity to widen market share and increase the growth of their business.
• Using Mevitae’s AI and Natural Language Processing platform, intelligent semantic query was developed for the Data Discovery Hub, enabling specific search terms and allowing non-specialist users to search relevant datasets, and understand their potential benefits.

The Future

By gaining a unique understanding of common search items and requirements from the end user community, catalogues of training data for supervised object detection have been created. MeVitae have offered recommendations to refine the Data Discovery Hub further. It is also possible to take the underlying technology and apply it to future projects that require NLP or advance search tools.