Armilla AI Raises $4.5 million
Armilla AI, a startup assessing AI models for safety and trustworthiness, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Mistral Venture Partners, with participation from MS&AD Ventures, SixThirty Ventures, Morgan Creek Digital, Y Combinator, Greenlight Re and Chaucer.
Founded in 2020, the Canadian startup helps enterprises and AI vendors verify the quality of an AI model. Leveraging requirements in global AI regulations and standards such as the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the Armilla Guaranteed platform first conducts assessments to verify the quality of an AI model, searching for threats like racial or gender bias and weak model formation. If that model does not perform as promised, the buyer of the product will be reimbursed for the license fee that they paid. The warranty is backed by Swiss Re, Greenlight Re and Chaucer who are responsible for fulfilling the warranty coverage.
“With so many ways to integrate AI into a business, one of the biggest challenges for enterprises is being confident in what they are procuring from third-party AI vendors. If one of those products breaks down, it’s the enterprise that takes the hit. With the introduction of our warranty product, we’re giving enterprises a guarantee that the AI products they choose are compliant, function as advertised, and because AI is susceptible to errors, they are protected when failures do happen. We believe this will fundamentally reshape the understanding of responsible AI, and the backing from our investors will help us explore additional insurance policies that limit risk for Enterprises.” – Karthik Ramakrishnan, CEO and co-founder of Armilla AI.
“AI has huge potential to drive growth and unlock new opportunities for the enterprise, but only if AI is accurate and dependable. We jumped at the opportunity to back Armilla because they are not only helping to promote more responsible AI but also providing protection and peace of mind. When it comes to new, ever-evolving technology like AI, that’s invaluable.” – Tiffine Wang, Partner at MS&AD Ventures.
“Customers and brokers we’ve spoken to are generally excited about the opportunity to have some form of AI protection. As it stands, given the rapidly evolving AI risk landscape, there is little to offer these customers today. Armilla has a deep technical understanding of AI and the regulatory landscape that surrounds it, allowing them to create a platform that automates a large portion of AI risk evaluation and provide a systematic methodology for evaluating AI risk across a range of model types and use cases.” – Brian O’Reilly, Head of Innovation at Greenlight.
