Startup already working with multiple Fortune 100 organizations to ensure model quality, adopt AI responsibly
Truera, which provides the industry’s first Model Intelligence platform, announced that on the heels of its successful launch out of stealth in August, it has closed $12M in Series A funding led by Wing VC with participation from returning investors Conversion Capital and Greylock and new investors Data Community Fund, B Capital Group via the firm’s Ascent Fund, and Harpoon Ventures. This brings Truera’s total funding to date to $17.3M.
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Truera’s model intelligence software removes the “black box” surrounding Machine Learning (ML) and provides intelligence and actionable insights throughout the ML model lifecycle – enabling companies to improve the quality and accuracy of their models, boost stakeholder collaboration, and address responsible AI concerns including explainability and bias. Truera’s technology builds on six years of AI Explainability research performed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), which pioneered many of the methods that are becoming the standard for explaining popular ML models such as Tree models and Neural Networks. Building on this research, Truera’s AI explainability technology devised by Co-founders Anupam Datta, President & Chief Scientist, Truera and Professor, CMU and Shayak Sen, CTO, addresses deficiencies in the industry’s first-generation Open Source software, enabling faster and more accurate AI explanations and analytics.
According to Wing VC Partner Jake Flomenberg (who has joined Truera’s board), a recent Wing VC survey of data scientists found:
- Model explainability was respondents’ top ML challenge, cited by greater than 45 percent of respondents, with data labeling a distant second (29 percent) and model deployment and data quality checks rounding out the top 4.
- Stakeholder collaboration was the top organizational challenge cited by over 40 percent of respondents, with domain knowledge, management buy-in and bias concerns also frequently mentioned.
- When asked what technology developments will be most important for data science and machine learning teams over the next 12 months, again Explainability was the #1 choice.
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“Explainability will be a critical focus for our industry in 2021,” said Flomenberg. “Truera’s model intelligence platform uniquely solves the model quality problems faced by every company building ML models. By removing the black box surrounding ML, Truera can improve stakeholder collaboration and buy-in, enable non-data scientist domain expertise and mitigate bias. Truera is on the forefront of working with companies like Standard Chartered to develop best-in-class responsible AI practices.” Wing has also been an early investor in companies like Snowflake and Gong.
The Truera platform is already deployed at and delivering value to a number of early Fortune 100 customers. “Every company adopting ML struggles to build high quality models that deliver on KPIs and that stakeholders can trust,” said Will Uppington, Co-founder and CEO of Truera. “Truera can help. Our model intelligence platform solves these issues during development, model review, testing and ML monitoring. We’re thankful to Wing, Greylock and Conversion Capital for supporting us on this journey.”
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