Alinia AI Raises $2.4M in Pre-Seed Funding to Enable Safe & Controlled Deployment of Generative AI
Former Twitter, IBM, and Hugging Face leaders combine their enterprise and AI governance expertise to tackle the challenge of controlling and guiding generative AI to benefit professionals and their clients. The round was led by Speedinvest and Precursor, backed by KFund, Tom Preston-Werner Ventures, and angels, including the founders of Hugging Face and GitHub.
NEW YORK, June 6, 2024 (Newswire.com) - Alinia AI, an alignment platform enabling companies’ safe and controlled deployment of generative AI, announces a successful $2.4M pre-Seed funding round. Speedinvest and Precursor led the round with participation from KFund and Tom Preston-Werner, and notable angels including Clem Delangue & Thom Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founders), Xavier Amatriain (Google Core AI VP), and Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind VP of Research).
Significant adoption of generative AI is underway with spending set to hit $143 billion by 2027, but its rapid adoption comes with significant challenges, such as managing control and safety in the face of risks to prevent inappropriate or brand-damaging content. Additionally, navigating upcoming regulatory efforts like the EU AI Act and Biden´s Executive Order also adds hurdles to mass enterprise adoption.
Evaluating the performance and reliability of generative AI applications from both safety and business dimensions is a top obstacle for the enterprise today. This is especially challenging for companies when leveraging advanced techniques like fine-tuning and RAG, maintaining LLM versions, and coordinating across teams including machine learning, governance, and business domain experts.
“The technology is not production-ready for business scenarios. Enterprise leaders are rightfully afraid of making headlines because their generative AI applications go rogue. Reputational harm keeps them up at night,” says Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder & CEO of Alinia. “Using a process known as Alignment, we ensure AI systems adhere to expected behaviors, policies, and regulatory requirements – helping enterprises seize the promise of this new technology while minimizing the risks and potential harm.”
“At Twitter, I saw firsthand the impact unintended bias of training data and ML algorithms can have on vulnerable populations, and I apply those learnings and experiences to Alinia so that other companies can increase their chances of getting generative AI right for their employees and their customers,” says Ariadna.
Alinia Alignment Platform aims to provide an integral AI governance approach ranging from evaluation and real-time monitoring to cutting-edge optimization techniques, coupled with documentation features facilitating compliance at every stage of the LLM lifecycle. Enabling customers to have clear and accurate evidence of how LLM-powered applications behave in different enterprise scenarios for specific tasks and abiding by specific rules is the first step towards alignment for the enterprise.
“In my experience at Hugging Face, governance and safety aspects of LLM development require an incredible amount of time and effort. But when you are about to release a foundation model that will be used millions of times, governance and safety are non-negotiables,” says Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, co-founder & COO.
With an initial focus on enabling subject-matter experts to guide and validate the performance and safety of their generative AI applications, Alinia will use the funding to hire additional talent to build the Alinia Alignment Platform to create an end-to-end alignment process focused on safety and regulatory requirements – enabling safe and inclusive use of generative AI across LLM modalities and languages.
Source: Alinia AI
