A pioneering entrepreneur who sold her Australian Artificial Intelligence business to IBM in 2014, has bagged funding from Silicon Valley investors and Westpac's Reinventure fund, as she works on futuristic plans to develop personal AI to form intrinsic relationships with humans.

Liesl Yearsley, who will be known to Australians by her maiden name Capper, is the co-founder and chief executive of Akin, a Silicon Valley and Sydney-based company that is conducting intensive research and development into the application of neuroscience into AI platforms.