Unloq, a Birmingham-based AI company helping businesses make better strategic decisions, has raised $1.2m to accelerate the development of its decision intelligence platform.
The round was led by the West Midlands Co-Investment Fund (WMCO), with backing from Future Planet Capital Regional, Mercia Ventures and Haatch.
Founded by Dr Yiannis Maos MBE and Satyen Fakey, Unloq is building AI software that helps organisations move beyond dashboards and retrospective reporting. Its platform connects internal business data with external market signals to predict likely outcomes, recommend practical actions and help leadership teams improve performance with greater confidence.
Unloq’s approach is built around one principle: AI should sharpen human judgement. Its platform applies prescriptive intelligence to recommend what to do next, test those recommendations against a company’s own goals and constraints, and improve as it learns from real outcomes.
Recognising Unloq’s potential to solve the emerging gap created by the failure of traditional corporate strategy to scale raw AI capabilities with its decision-intelligence technology, this latest round of investment will allow the company to spearhead the transition to agile, high-accuracy next-generation operations.
Dr Yiannis Maos MBE, co-founder and CEO of Unloq, said:
“Most businesses are surrounded by data, but still rely on backward-looking reports to make decisions about the future. We started Unloq to change that. Our ambition is to help organisations predict what is likely to happen next, understand why, and take the right action at the right time.
“We are proud to be building from Birmingham with global ambitions. The West Midlands has the talent, industrial base and entrepreneurial energy to produce world-class AI companies, and this investment gives us the platform to prove that.”
Satyen Fakey, co-founder and CTO of Unloq, said:
“I have watched plenty of AI pilots impress a room and then stall in procurement, because no one could defend the recommendation to a board or a regulator. That gap, between a smart LLM response and an accountable decision, is the real problem worth solving.
“What we are building next is the prescriptive layer: a governed system that recommends the action, checks it against your own constraints and policies, and measures the ROI, while the decision stays with the people responsible for it. Get that right and strategy stops being a quarterly guess on a dashboard. It becomes something you can engineer.”
Shubham Jaipuria, Investment Manager, Mercia Ventures, said:
“Yiannis and Satyen have a clear vision for how AI can create practical value for businesses. Rather than adding to the noise around AI adoption, they are focused on helping organisations make better decisions with greater confidence and accountability. In a short period of time, they have demonstrated both strong customer demand and an ability to translate complex technology into measurable business outcomes. We are delighted to support them as they continue building Unloq from Birmingham for a global market.”
Dr Maos added:
“The companies that win with AI will not be the ones that simply adopt more tools. They will be the ones that embed intelligence into how they plan, decide and act. That is the category we are building for.”