- Arthur, a company that helps you monitor machine learning models in production, announced it raised $3.3 million
Arthur — a company that helps you monitor machine learning models that are in production — announced via TechCrunch that it raised $3.3 million in a seed round of funding. This funding round had actually closed in August.
This round of funding was co-led by Work-Bench and Index Ventures with participation from Homebrew partner Hunter Walk, Yahoo co-founder/AME Ventures partner Jerry Yang, etc.
Arthur CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel told TechCrunch that the company is comparable to products offered by New Relic or DataDog. Rather than monitoring systems, it tracks the performance of machine learning models.
“We are an AI monitoring and explainability company, which means when you put your models in production, we let you monitor them to know that they’re not going off the rails, that you can explain what they’re doing, that they’re not performing badly and are not being totally biassed — all of the ways models can go wrong,” said Wenchel via TechCrunch.
Wenchel said that data scientists build machine learning models and have to test them in the labs. But when the model leaves the controlled environment of the lab, there are issues that could go wrong and it can be hard to track.
“Models always perform well in the lab, but then you put them out in the real world and there is often a drop-off in performance — in fact, almost always. So being able to measure and monitor that is a capability people really need,” added Wenchel.
“We regularly speak with ML executives from Fortune 1000 companies and one of their biggest concerns as they become more data-driven is model behavior in production. The Arthur platform is by far the best solution we’ve seen for AI monitoring and transparency,” explained Work-Bench general partner Jonathan Lehr.
