Swedish AI startup Opper has raised a €3m pre-seed, led by Swedish VC Luminar, with the participation of Lovable backers Spotify alumni fund Greens Ventures and French VC Emblem.
The company, which has been in stealth since November 2023, is now launching its task completion platform for building AI integrations.
This isn’t the founders’, Johan Gustafsson and Göran Sandahl, first attempt at building an AI startup, nor their first company together.
In 2012 they founded machine learning startup Unomaly. The company developed an AI tool to detect anomalies such as unfamiliar event structures, unusual parameter values or unexpected frequency changes early.
By the mid-2010s, Unomaly was often described as one of the Swedish companies to keep an eye on, and in 2016 the company raised its €4.6m Series A led by EQT Ventures. Four years later, in 2020, Unomaly was sold to US-based network monitoring company LogicMonitor for an undisclosed amount.
“The tool we sold to LogicMonitor is now used in about 10–20% of the Fortune 500,” says Sandahl.
While Unomaly focused on finding subtle signals in huge amounts of data, Opper now wants to make AI reliable and secure for business-critical applications. According to the founders, it’s building on the same basic idea – but now with a focus on the reliability of AI models and their integration into business processes.
“What we’re really trying to address is the fundamental problem that these AI models are probabilistic,” says Sandahl. “Just like with a human, if we ask the same question tomorrow that we asked today, we’re not sure we’re going to get the same answer.”
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When companies want to integrate AI into their services — whether for customer support or other use cases — they expect the same reliability as traditional software, often up to 99.95% uptime or consistency, Sandahl says. Achieving that level of quality is difficult with probabilistic AI, and Opper is focused on solving that challenge.
“So what we’re doing with our task completion API is really building a system on top of these models that makes them reliable, so that you can trust that output,” he says.
Opper, with a team of seven, operates under a Stripe-like business model where customers pay a percentage fee on top of the model cost, as well as a free and enterprise tier.
Throughout its beta testing, it has attracted paying customers, or as the founders call them, “design partners”, such as Ping Payments, Beatly, GetTested and more.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/lovable-backers-bet-on-ai-repeat-founders/
