Every company these days is trying to ensure that its large language models comply with all the rules and legal or regulatory requirements they deem important. The need is even more acute if you work in a regulated industry. Perhaps this is why Patronus AI is finding early success in the market.
On Wednesday, the company, which helps customers ensure their models are compatible in many respects, announced a $17 million Series A, just eight months after announcing a $3 million seed round.
“What investors are most excited about is that we are the clear leader in this space, and this is a really big market and a very fast-growing market,” CEO and co-founder Anand Kannappan told TechCrunch. Moreover, Patronus was able to get started early upon realizing that companies needed LLM governance tools to help them maintain compliance.
They believe in the potential of a growing market that is just beginning. “Since launch, we have worked with a wide range of portfolio companies, AI companies, and mid-sized companies, and have received hundreds of thousands of requests from customers through our platform.”
The company's main focus is its work called Patronus Evaluators. “This is essentially an API call that can be implemented with one line of code and allows you to scalably measure the performance of LLMs and LLM systems across multiple dimensions in a very high quality and very reliable way,” Kannappan said.
These include hallucination potential, copyright risks, safety risks, business-sensitive information, company-specific capabilities such as brand voice and style detection, and what companies care about from a regulatory and reputational perspective.
At the time of seed announcement we wrote:
“The company is in the right place at the right time, building a security and analytics framework as a managed service to test language models at scale to identify areas that may be problematic, particularly the potential for hallucinations. This is because there is not enough data to answer accurately.”
The company has doubled its staff of six at seed funding last year and expects to double again this year.
The $17 million investment was led by Notable Capital with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Factorial Capital and industry angels.
