- Fiddler Labs, a next-generation explainable AI engine, announced it raised $10.2 million in Seres A funding
Fiddler Labs announced it has raised $10.2 million in Series A funding to accelerate its work building its breakthrough Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine with explainability at its heart. And this is essential for businesses looking to infuse transparency and responsibility in their AI initiatives. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lux Capital led this round of funding with participation from Haystack Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.
Launched in October 2018 by CEO Krishna Gade and CPO Amit Paka, Fiddler Labs addresses the rising risks and costly implications of not having visibility and insight into how artificial intelligence works. Essentially, explainability is the missing link and the reason why so many businesses find deploying AI risky.
The Fiddler Explainable AI Engine gets ahead of this by enabling companies to better understand why their machine learning and artificial intelligence models make the decisions they do. And Fiddler is the first startup to bring true explainability to the enterprise: the art of understanding, analyzing, validating, and monitoring artificial intelligence solutions at the scale required in the modern business environment.
“Businesses understand the value AI provides, but they struggle with the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ when using traditional black box AI,” said Fiddler CEO and co-founder Krishna Gade. “Businesses need to de-risk their AI investments, but most applications today aren’t equipped to help them do that. Our AI Engine is grounded in explainability, so those affected by the technology can understand why decisions were made and course-correct as needed to ensure the AI outputs are ethical, responsible and fair.”
The co-founders of Fiddler know firsthand the difficulties companies face when trying to understand their own machine learning models. And before starting Fiddler, Gade was an engineering manager on Facebook’s AI-driven News Feed where he and his team explained why a particular story was displayed. And the explanations proved useful for Facebook users and internal teams ranging from engineering all the way up to senior leadership.
The idea for Fiddler came together when Gade connected with Paka, his former colleague and classmate — who faced challenges getting insights into AI-driven product recommendations used in Shopping Apps in his previous role at Samsung. They launched Fiddler together with the goal of unlocking the AI “black box.”
Fiddler is on a mission to provide a transparent, trustworthy, and operational approach to analyzing and managing AI solutions and programs. And Fiddler meets the needs of a variety of stakeholders, including product owners, data scientists, business analysts and operations teams by infusing explainability into the full lifecycle of AI solutions.
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt many industries, but Fiddler is one of the first companies we’ve seen that wants to ensure this is done in a responsible and ethical way from the start,” added Ravi Mhatre, the Founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners. “What excited us about Fiddler’s approach was the market potential of explainability. We think artificial intelligence cannot exist without transparency and Fiddler has an approach that can scale while addressing the needs of several markets.”
