REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Dec. 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Truera, which provides the industry’s first Model Intelligence platform, announced today 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.
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.
“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.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for enterprises to manage and monitor AI model quality, as models around the world broke as a result of rapidly changing market conditions. Truera not only helps enterprises build higher quality models during development, but also helps them monitor them in production on a continuous basis, flagging any potential problems that could impact performance, even when updated labels and re-training is not possible.
“Truera is hitting the market at just the right time,” said Uppington. “We are seeing strong demand for our model intelligence solutions, and this funding will help us accelerate recruiting, product development, and sales and marketing efforts so we can fulfill that demand and help organizations adopt AI more effectively and more responsibly.”
To learn more about Truera or schedule a demo, visit https://truera.com/.
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:
Michelle Faulkner
617-510-6998
michelle@big-swing.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2e1b6569-7969-4855-aa44-a55f53506e65