AI testing startup Kolena secures $15m Series A investment to accelerate growth

Kolena, a pioneering leader in AI and machine learning model testing, announced it has secured $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Lobby Capital, bringing total funding for the company to $21 million. Returning investors SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, 11.2 Capital, Zero Prime Ventures and others also participated. This significant investment will fuel Kolena's mission to revolutionize the way AI systems are tested and validated, ensuring trustworthiness and reliability in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Kolena's innovative platform allows enterprises and teams to rapidly assemble highly specific test cases from the data sets that power their AI models, enabling evaluation of each model's effectiveness in key scenarios and applications. This 'fine-grained' testing approach allows teams to root out unexpected model behavior such as biased hiring algorithms, false positives or misclassifications in critical healthcare applications and a vast range of other failure modes.

The company's solution also helps teams and enterprises launch their models more quickly by eliminating the need for time-consuming experimentation-based testing. The platform was designed for computer vision, generative AI, natural language processing, LLMs and multi-modal models.

Mohamed Elgendy, Co-founder and CEO, Kolena: "We are thrilled to have secured $21 million in funding to further accelerate our efforts to enable AI developers around the world to build reliable AI systems. This investment will allow us to invest in research and development to build a systematic and rigorous AI quality framework along with toolings that empower businesses to build AI systems that society can trust, thereby accelerating AI adoption. As AI continues to transform various industries, Kolena is committed to leading the charge in the model testing space to contribute to the development and deployment of trustworthy AI systems. With the support of this significant funding, we will continue to innovate, improve, and revolutionize the way AI is built."

Companies worldwide have been hesitant to fully embrace AI without a comprehensive solution in place to test and validate the robustness, fairness, factualness, and bias of AI systems. Regular headlines featuring high-profile AI failures have further emphasized the critical need for Kolena's standardized and rigorous framework for AI quality assurance, which provides unprecedented visibility into a model's performance in the precise scenarios they'll be entrusted to handle in the real world.

Eric Carlborg, Founder, Lobby Capital: "It's no secret that unpredictable behavior by AI and ML models is one of the key constraints holding back more widespread AI adoption. Enterprises cannot risk deploying a model as part of their tech stack - much less as part of a customer-facing application - without assurance that it is safe, reliable and fair. Traditional testing approaches, however, remain incredibly time-consuming and imprecise, relying on experimentation and guesswork. Kolena's solution solves both of these fundamental challenges, bringing rigor and visibility to the testing process that goes far beyond 'statistical accuracy' while simultaneously transforming testing from an inefficient manual process into a true engineering discipline."

Kolena has already demonstrated remarkable success with its revolutionary approach. Several Fortune 500 companies, leading AI startups, government organizations and European AI standardization institutes have adopted Kolena's solution, experiencing improved AI system performance and enhanced trust among their customers. The company also supports AI testing for military applications around the world.

Oana Olteanu, Partner, SignalFire Venture: "As an early investor in Kolena, we were immediately impressed with Mohamed and his vision. That vision has been the driving force behind attracting a very strong team, including engineers and leaders who have built AI products and infrastructure for Amazon, Rakuten and Palantir. Given the team's deep insight into the pain points involved in model testing, we believe that Kolena's platform will become the industry standard in the near future. By enabling enterprises and developers to reduce time spend by up to 50% versus experimentation-based testing while eliminating 60% - 80% of model failures in production within the first few weeks of adoption, Kolena is poised to become a foundational piece of the global AI ecosystem."

www.kolena.io