Alinia AI, an alignment platform enabling companies’ safe and controlled deployment of generative AI, guided by their policies and business preferences, announces a successful €2.2 million pre-seed funding round. Speedinvest and Precursor led the round with participation from KFund and notable angels including Clem Délangue & Thom Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founders), Tom Preston (GitHub Co-Founder), 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. The problem? 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, Biden´s Executive Order, or Canada´s Bill C-27, which demand rigorous safety checks and clear documentation, 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,” said 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.”
Founded in 2023, Alinia Alignment Platform aims to provide an integral AI governance approach – which currently requires multiple tools – 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,” addedCarlos 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.
Fred Hagenauer, Partner with Speedinvest, said: “Ari and Carlos have some of the best profiles we´ve seen to tackle the alignment problem in the generative AI space. Their experience and knowledge of the early days of enterprise AI, RAI, and the LLM governance required today is something truly unique. For us, it was a no-brainer to be the first ones to support them.”
Charles Hudson, Managing Partner with Precursor Ventures, commented: “Alinia brings the confidence that enterprise lacks today to deploy generative AI in a safe and trustworthy way. Being able to control and steer these powerful agents is such a challenge, but they have the experience needed and are willing to take it head-on.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/06/barcelona-based-alinia-raises-e2-2-million-pre-seed-to-enable-safe-deployment-of-genai/
