A VC fund that keeps picking British AI winners has raised another £120 million

Venture capital firm Octopus Ventures has raised a £120 million fund to invest in UK technology startups, The Financial Times reports. The London-based investment company, part of UK fund management firm Octopus Group, has reportedly now raised a total of £660 million, fuelled in part by a string of successful UK startup exits. Natural language processing pioneer Evi Technologies, predictive keyboard startup SwiftKey, and AI video startup Magic Pony are all in the Octopus Ventures portfolio, as are companies like LoveFilm and property website Zoopla. "Evi Technologies in Cambridge was sold to Amazon and now powers Alexa, the voice-activated speaker," Alex Macpherson, chief executive of Octopus Ventures, told the FT. "We also backed Swiftkey which went to Microsoft last year [for $250 million; £200 million] and made a seed investment in Magic Pony, which went to Twitter [for $150m; £120 million].