Public Funding for Dark Matter Data Limited

Founded by Matthew Barnett and Andrew Church, DarkMatter is a UK-based SME that intends to address the current challenges in delivering anti-bully and harassment strategies in the increasing environment of homeworking. Offering backgrounds in IT consultancy, Big Data NLP and ML, and Wellbeing Programmes, the founders of this project propose to develop a machine learning product, which intends to reduce bullying and harassment, and utilise natural language processing. This project could improve employee wellbeing on a wide scale and support organisations' responsibility to address issues of inequality and discrimination. DarkMatter anticipates a Year-5 post-project revenue of £5.1M. **Scope/Summary** Current approaches to anti-bully and harassment prevention are, in many cases, not digitalised and not equipped to address employee needs in the increased landscape of homeworking. DarkMatter's software will address this issue by using NLP to analyse employees' behaviour and flag when safeguarding and/or wellbeing is being impeded. **Innovation and EDI Considerations** DarkMatter's remote worker/learner bullying and harassment software offers an ethically-focused listening application to standard PCs, which harvests and securely transmits written/spoken data to its advanced analytics platform. Due to the sensitivity of the data sourced, this is hosted on secure on-premise infrastructure. The development of NLP, Neural Networks, and Machine Learning models, at a depth that was previously unavailable, has ensured the development of a solution that vectors keywords and phrases. Employee sentiments and emotions can be classified against a bullying and harassment behavioural baseline, and subsequently providing an automated alerting where a concern is flagged. In addition, team level behavioural patterns may be mapped and analysed over time to identify abnormalities relating to the inclusion and consistency of communication with specific individuals. There are no identified potential or inadvertent racial/ethnic/gender biases within our proposal that could negatively affect any one gender or ethnic group. This will continue to be monitored throughout the project. **Market Opportunity and Sustainability** Work-related bullying and harassment are reaching epidemic levels. There is currently no solution to holistically monitor and safeguard remote working teams against either. DarkMatter's innovation will be first to market. DarkMatter's innovation will help to maintain the heightened levels of remote working and, consequently, reduce the need for business travel and its associated carbon footprint. The global and UK annual addressable/serviceable markets are £818.28M/£818.28M and £145M/£50M, respectively (CAGR: 7.1% 2019-2027; The Insight Partners).