Aporia Raises $25 Million to Ensure Responsible AI and Illuminate the Black Box

By AIT News Desk On Mar 3, 2022

Aporia, the end-to-end observability platform for machine learning, announced today a $25 million Series A funding round, led by venture capital giant Tiger Global, with participation from Samsung Next, existing investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures. The announcement comes just ten months after their $5 million seed, bringing Aporia’s total amount raised to $30 million. Aporia will use the funds to triple its team’s headcount over the next year, expand its presence in the US market and increase the range of use cases the solution addresses.

AI is part of our daily lives, with the majority of respondents in a recent McKinsey survey saying their organization has adopted AI to support a variety of functions including product, customer support, marketing and sales. Yet irresponsible use of AI can have devastating consequences for businesses and people. Zillow’s reported failure to accurately leverage AI to forecast house prices led to hundreds of millions in losses and thousands of employee layoffs, while a biased AI recruitment tool reportedly discriminated against women.

“Every organization using AI must have visibility on whether their ML models are accurate, equitable and fair,” said Liran Hason, CEO and co-founder of Aporia. “Data scientists require a tailor-made observability solution to ensure the safety of their highly specialized AI models, but it’s expensive and time-consuming to build one from scratch. Businesses that have embraced AI and are enjoying the benefits are eager to put safeguards in place to ensure they use their AI responsibly and don’t negatively impact their customers and business.”

Aporia empowers businesses to trust their AI by allowing them to create their own custom monitoring solution within minutes, providing full visibility of how models are performing in the real world. Data scientists can easily create customizable monitors to detect a wide range of issues including biased predictions, unexpected changes in the format of the input data, or degradation in a model’s performance over time. The platform provides actionable insights that help data scientists investigate and get to the root cause of any issue. Aporia’s self-serve solution can be seamlessly integrated with existing infrastructure so ML practitioners can easily get started, yet it is highly customizable, allowing them to define tailor-made monitoring logic that fits the unique needs of their complex models.

“We see incredible demand for our platform as business leaders understand that AI isn’t a novelty or even a competitive advantage — it’s now a necessity,” said Hason. “AI has gone mainstream and just like software, AI has issues and bugs. The fact that AI is a black box makes these issues more difficult to spot, resulting in a potentially larger impact and introducing risks like bias. These issues are now a daily reality that companies are grappling with and that are affecting all of us. Aporia is experiencing a flood of organizations adopting our solution and this funding will allow us to meet the need and ensure everyone can benefit from AI responsibly and with confidence.”

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Aporia has experienced a 600% growth in customers over the past six months. Hundreds of leading companies like New Relic, Lemonade and Armis trust Aporia’s solution to gain visibility and explainability of ML models in production.

Additionally, Aporia announced the release of new capabilities for explaining how models are making predictions. Black box AI models are difficult to trust with business-critical decisions, and there are regulatory requirements with some AI usages that necessitate providing customers with an explanation on how a decision was reached, as is the case with loan applications. The platform helps interpret how models are making predictions, by showing how much each input parameter contributed to the decision and how the prediction shifts with changes to the input data.

“Aporia has demonstrated unbelievable growth since its launch and has amazing momentum, quickly becoming a leader in the space of ML observability,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Executives at global enterprises understand the benefits of artificial intelligence and how it’s impacting virtually every industry but the risks keep them awake at night. Aporia is positioned to be the solution every organization turns to for ensuring their responsible use of AI.”

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