The company also announced it has raised a $5.1M first round of funding, led by Greylock with additional investors including Wing VC, Conversion Capital, and Aaref Hilaly.
While the use of ML is exploding, ML models are still black boxes. They are created by algorithms that automatically learn complex patterns from the data on which they are trained. As a result, even the data scientist who uses these algorithms to create the model doesn’t know exactly how it works.
This black box problem makes it challenging for data scientists to build high quality models that not only achieve test accuracy hurdles but also generalize and perform well in the real world. Business partners, regulators, operators and customers find it harder to trust and adopt ML-powered applications. Black box models raise societal concerns about fairness, bias and transparency. It’s harder to maintain black box ML model performance and trust over time when new data changes from the training data used to create the model – a challenge called “concept drift” that is top of mind during the current Coronavirus pandemic.
Two of Truera’s founders, Anupam Datta and Shayak Sen, were pioneers in the development of AI Explainability technology for the past six years at Carnegie Mellon where Datta is a professor and Sen earned his PhD. In parallel, Will Uppington was leading product and customer facing teams at a previous startup where he experienced the black box challenges of ML and observed how a lack of model intelligence negatively impacted model development, selling and customer success. Datta, Sen and Uppington joined forces in 2019 to create a model intelligence solution to solve the industry’s black box problem and make sure AI was implemented responsibly and in a way that makes the world better for everyone.
Truera’s AI.Q technology – the basis for its platform – is the best enterprise-class AI Explainability technology in the market. It performs sophisticated sensitivity analysis that enables data scientists and non-data scientists to understand exactly why a model makes a prediction. Current alternatives are less accurate, significantly slower and do not meet all of the enterprise and regulatory explainability requirements.
The Truera platform can be deployed on-premise or in a company’s private cloud in hours, to help customers:
“Truera’s Model Intelligence platform and its AI.Q technology are fundamental breakthroughs in AI,” said Jerry Chen, Partner at Greylock, who led Truera’s first funding round. “Removing the black box problem of machine learning is essential to build effective and responsible ML applications. The Truera team has the unparalleled research, engineering and business experience to solve this problem. We are excited to partner with Anupam, Shayak and Will in transforming the way machine learning models are built, governed and operationalized.”
To learn more, visit Truera and read our launch blog articles Introducing Truera and Why Machine Learning Needs Model Intelligence.
About Truera
Truera provides the first Model Intelligence platform, to help enterprises analyze machine learning, improve model quality and build trust. Powered by enterprise-class Artificial Intelligence (AI) Explainability technology based on six years of research at Carnegie Mellon University, Truera’s platform helps eliminate the black box surrounding widely used AI and ML technologies. This visibility leads to higher quality, explainable models that achieve measurable business results, address unfair bias, and ensure governance and compliance. To learn more, visit https://truera.com/.
Media contact:Kerry [email protected]