Pires upbeat on developments at Sure Valley investment

Technology investment company Pires Investments updated the market on its investment in Sure Valley Ventures on Friday, in relation to Sure Valley portfolio company Ambisense, which provides sensors and an analysis platform to allow real-time gas and environmental monitoring.

The AIM-traded firm said Ambisense was entering the air quality market with the launch of ‘AmbiAir’, which it described as a solution designed to help manage, assess, and predict the Covid-19 risk in commercial and public buildings .

It said that by increasing building ventilation and combining it with measures such as social distancing, it was possible to decrease the Covid-19 risk in public spaces.

Studies reportedly showed that the danger of exposure to Covid-19 was reduced when the level of carbon dioxide was below 600 parts per million, relative humidity was between 40% and 60%, and there were “no or very minimal” levels of PM2.5 particulates.

AmbiAir was described as a low-cost solution that combined discreet, multi-deployable hardware with ‘Ambilytics’, which is an intelligent platform that trawls through location-based data to understand the performance of “critical risk drivers”, identifying risk hot-spots in real-time, and predicting when safe levels were likely to be breached.

Pires said AmbiAir, the first in a range of air quality solutions being released by Ambisense this year, combined multiple tools and techniques useful to air quality professionals to understand the behaviour of air quality pollutants.

Pires has a circa 13% interest in Sure Valley Ventures, which it described as a venture capital fund focussed on investing in the software technology sector, with a specific focus on artificial intelligence, the internet-of-things and immersive technologies.

“Ambisense's launch of AmbiAir, a solution designed to help manage, assess, and predict the Covid-19 risk in commercial and public buildings, is particularly timely considering the challenges the global pandemic continues to bring to everyday living,” said chairman Peter Redmond.

“AmbiAir is an innovative product to complement already established measures safeguarding the public from Covid-19, aiming to reduce the risk of the virus in buildings and encourage employees to return to a safer working environment.

“Ambisense has vast experience in this industry and has proven its capabilities by launching this solution at a time when it is of significant demand.”

At 0900 BST, shares in Pires Investments were up 6.67% at 4.8p.