Robust Intelligence, an artificial intelligence startup whose goal is to help companies test their artificial intelligence models to avoid mistakes, has raised a round of funding in Serie B of 30 million dollars led by TigerGlobal. The previous investor Sequoia, who led the round of Serie A of the company, as well as Harpoon Venture Capital e Engineering Capital also participated in this round.
The company was co-founded by Yaron Singer, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, and his former student Kojin Oshiba.
"AI has been an academic endeavor," Singer said. “When I was in graduate school, it was an academic discipline, it was a vision. And then came the Internet, data, Google and data processing, and then its potential was realized within seven or eight years. We are now trying to be as rigorous with this discipline as we have been in software development for 60 years. We are trying to catch up with the AI and it is a animal completely different ".
As Singer pointed out, given its statistical nature, AI can exhibit unexpected behavior. In essence, the mission of Robust Intelligence is to eliminate these AI errors.
To do so, the company offers its users what it calls Robust Intelligence Model Engine (RIME), which is basically a firewall with artificial intelligence at its core. This firewall wraps around a company's AI models and protects it from making mistakes by constantly stress testing these models.
“If you have an AI model and you have data, with a click of a button you run stress tests. We automatically test the data and its AI models, both before the model goes into production and while it is in production,” Singer said. The idea here is to automatically find the errors in any given model, but also to detect problems like data drift and related issues.
What's interesting here is that the AI firewall itself is an AI model that predicts whether a data point will lead to an incorrect prediction. "This is one of the hardest problems we're solving in artificial intelligence and machine learning," Singer explained.
“I was exposed for the first time to the capabilities of Howitzer Intelligence in the early development of the company,” said John Curtius, Tiger Global Partner. “After seeing the company and its product grow over the past year, it became clear that the offerings of Robust Intelligence are changing trust in AI, and I knew Tiger Global could help provide key resources.”
The company plans to use the new funds to boost sales, but most will go to products and engineering.
