Series B round led by Menlo Ventures; former Splunk CTO Tim Tully joins board
TruEra, which provides the first suite of AI Quality management solutions for AI explainability and model quality, announced today that it has closed a $25M Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Harpoon Ventures, Conversion Capital, the Data Community Fund, and new investors Forgepoint Capital and the B Capital Group’s Ascent Fund. The B Capital Partners’ Innovators Fund invested in TruEra’s Series A investment round. TruEra – which has now raised $42.3M to date – will use the funds for expanding product development, sales, marketing, and customer success initiatives.
TruEra addresses the next big challenge of AI – the quality challenge. TruEra’s solutions help ensure model quality by providing key performance analytics in the development phase, and then monitoring in live use to ensure rapid debugging and optimal ongoing performance. Due to this unique, full lifecycle approach to model quality, TruEra has been selected as the preferred vendor by multiple Fortune 100 companies. In June 2021, TruEra was named a “Cool Vendor” by expert analysts at Gartner, Inc in the report titled, “Cool Vendors in AI Governance and Responsible AI.” In March 2021, the company was named to Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for AI. The technology foundation for the company traces its origin to work by TruEra co-founders Anupam Datta and Shayak Sen at Carnegie Mellon University.
“Demand for AI model quality solutions is exploding as enterprises seek to maximize the benefits of their AI applications, as well as avoid negative headlines and the regulatory consequences of AI snafus,” said Tim Tully, Partner at Menlo Ventures, who has also joined TruEra’s Board of Directors. “While testing and monitoring has been common in the software world for decades, it’s only made its way into AI applications recently. Our research found that TruEra has by far the strongest enterprise-class offering, deep technical credibility due to its ties to Carnegie Mellon University, and a track record of customers selecting TruEra over other players in this space. We’re excited to work closely with the TruEra team to help get its solutions to enterprises around the world.”
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According to Will Uppington, co-founder and CEO of TruEra, the company’s revenue has grown over fivefold and head count tripled in the last 12 months. The company has a growing pipeline of opportunities with large and mid-size enterprises, as well as government agencies. “TruEra’s solution has struck a chord with companies that need enterprise-class solutions to AI Quality challenges,” Uppington said. “As we help organizations tackle some of their critical AI issues, such as drift, performance management, and fairness, we’re fortunate to have such a strong stable of investors to advise us as we grow. We are delighted to have a technical and industry thought leader like Tim Tully on our board.”
Belcorp, a leading beauty products company headquartered in Peru and operating in 13 countries in the Americas through over 800,000 beauty consultants, selected TruEra in 2021 to proactively ensure the quality of its supply chain models. “We did a thorough analysis of our alternatives and selected TruEra as our AI Quality management partner because they offered differentiated performance monitoring, diagnostics and explainability capabilities,” said Venkat Gopalan, CDO and CTO, Belcorp. “At Belcorp, AI is critical to our marketing, consumer experience, sales, R&D, merchandising and supply chain operations. TruEra helps to ensure that our AI systems are continuously performing at a high level, and its accurate root cause analysis ensures that any issues are quickly identified and addressed.”
Recently, TruEra forged new partnerships with New Relic, which has integrated TruEra monitoring alerts into its software monitoring dashboards, and NVIDIA, as part of its NVIDIA Inception program.