Hirundo, a specialist in machine unlearning, announced that it has raised an $8 million seed funding round, led by Maverick Ventures Israel, with participation from SuperSeed, Alpha Intelligence Capital, Tachles VC, and AI.FUND and Plug and Play Tech Center.
What the company does: The company is developing industry-first solutions to eliminate poisoned, malicious, and confidential data from trained AI models, addressing biases and hallucinations — the issue of AI models generating misleading or inaccurate information that appears factual. Hirundo achieves this without needing to retrain models from scratch and without compromising model performance, thereby reducing the risk of AI adoption.
When deployed, Hirundo’s solution has led to the removal of up to 70% of biases, as demonstrated in their work on DeepSeek-R1, as well as up to 55% reduction of hallucinations and 85% decrease in successful prompt injections, showcased with the company’s work on Llama.
Problem being addressed: As generative AI evolves from experimentation to enterprise infrastructure, critical flaws start to appear. And after a model is trained, fine-tuned, or deployed, its mistakes are nearly impossible to fix. As AI becomes more pervasive and more powerful, more hallucinations and biases are uncovered, with hallucinations worse now than ever before.
This leads to legal, reputational, and operational risks for businesses relying on it. Hirundo addresses the flaws in AI from a unique starting point, which is after a model is already trained. By retroactively removing undesired behaviors and inaccuracies from AI models without compromising the model’s capabilities or requiring retraining—a time-consuming and multi-million-dollar exercise—Hirundo enhances AI performance and reliability, enabling businesses to deploy AI with confidence.
Founders: Founded in 2023 by Emeritus Professor Oded Shmueli, former Dean of Computer Science and EVP at Israel’s Technion, alongside Ben Luria, serial entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar, and Michael Leybovich, an expert in the field of data lineage,
KEY QUOTES:
“Broader adoption of AI is limited by hallucinations and undesired behaviors which make models too risky to deploy in enterprise-level applications. With Hirundo, models can be remediated instantly at their core, working towards fairer and more accurate outputs. Hirundo’s solution operates like a form of AI model “neurosurgery,” pinpointing where in a model’s billions of parameters hallucinations originate or toxic knowledge encoded, and precisely removing it. We ensure data is reliably deleted, model accuracy is assured, and the process is scalable and repeatable. We welcome this latest funding which will enable us to enhance our technology and with it, support the broader adoption of AI.”
Ben Luria CEO & Co-Founder of Hirundo
“Without removing hallucinations or biased intelligence from AI, we end up distorting outcomes and encouraging mistrust – for organizations and enterprises this means legal, financial and real-world consequences. A majority of businesses suffer from AI built with bias, but most cannot address it sufficiently. Hirundo offers a type of AI triage; removing untruths or data built on discriminatory sources and completely transforming the possibilities of AI. We are delighted to invest and support their onward journey.”
Yaron Carni, Founder at Maverick Ventures Israel, which led this funding round
“We invest in exceptional AI companies transforming industry verticals, but this transformation is only as powerful as the models themselves are trustworthy. Hirundo’s technology is groundbreaking in addressing the hallucination and bias problems that plague even the most advanced models today. Their approach to machine unlearning addresses a critical gap in the AI development lifecycle.”
Mads Jensen, Managing Partner of SuperSeed
