- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) company RealityEngines announced it raised $5.25 million in funding
- The lead investors in this round include Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram
RealityEngines is an artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup that recently raised $5.25 million in funding. The lead investors in this round included former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt and founding Google board member Ram Shriram. Khosla Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Deep Nishar, Elad Gil, Keval Desai, and Don Burnette also joined the round.
With this round of funding, RealityEngines is going to create an R&D team that is focused on AI and ML research to solve hard real-world problems and create pay-as-you-go cloud managed services that are to organizations of all sizes.
RealityEngines is planning to address three real-world artificial intelligence challenges. This includes training accurate AI models with incomplete/noisy data since organizations often have sparse, incomplete, or noisy datasets. And RealityEngines is looking to create artificial intelligence that takes care of all the heavily-lifting involved in creating near state-of-the-art machine learning systems and enabling developers and data scientists to create new ML/AI systems in hours rather than months. Plus RealityEngines plans to build explainability and fairness into AI and machine learning systems since black box AI models that produce unexplained predictions cannot earn the trust of domain experts and business owners.
By addressing these challenges, RealityEngines will enable small and medium-sized tech companies to take advantage of AI and ML technologies.
RealityEngines was founded by CEO Bindu Reddy, COO Chetan Rai, and CTO Arvind Sundararajan. Prior to launching RealityEngines, Reddy was the general manager for AI Verticals at Amazon Web Services. And she was also previously the head of product for Google Apps before she launched another company called Post Intelligence (acquired by Uber).
And Rai was previously an executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) where he served as the GM and VP of Infosight — which is the predictive analytics platform for AIOps. Rai had joined HPE through the $1 billion acquisition of Nimble Storage where he worked as the VP of Engineering and a founding team member.
Sundararajan used to be a senior engineering leader at Uber’s autonomous vehicle program (ATG) and at Google. And while at Google, Sundararajan was the engineering lead for the Gmail backend and the serving infrastructure of AdSense.
RealityEngines is using a dataset augmentation technique to synthetically expand a training dataset by applying a wide array of domain-specific transformations. This is a useful tool for small datasets and has been effective on larger datasets. And RealityEngines is going to combine neural nets with logic rules. Plus RealityEngines is also using transfer learning, which is a machine learning technique that allows the company to reuse policies from one domain or dataset on a related domain or dataset.
RealityEngines’ business model is to set up a “pay-as-you-go” model instead of charging subscription fees. This model could be seen as favorable for enterprises so that they don’t pay for the services every month without potentially using it.
