Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Maynard was one of the founders of Netstore plc and spent many years leading the technology arms of two FTSE 100 companies, British Airways and Cable & Wireless.

Envisional, which specialises in A3I – advanced, automated artificial intelligence – has spent six years developing a patented technology platform that can carry out intelligent searches covering the whole of the internet.

This means penetrating far beyond the publicly available realm of the world wide web, into the darker areas such as B2B auction sites, internet relay chat channels, peer-to-peer networks and closed newsgroups.

As these shady corners of the “deep internet” are where most of the phishing, counterfeiting and piracy activity is hatched, Envisional has built applications that use its A3I technology to monitor criminal activity.

The company already has an impressive blue chip client list for these services, ranging from international banks and Hollywood movie studios to global brand owners such as Nestlé, BP, Microsoft, adidas and the UEFA Champions League.

“To be able to search millions of sources, capture thousands of data points and distil all this down into a short list of a few dozen prioritised results, ranked according to your specific needs, is going to be tremendously useful in many different business contexts,”says Maynard.