Alinia AI, an alignment platform that enables companies to safely and effectively deploy generative AI, has announced a successful $2.4M pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Speedinvest and Precursor, with participation from KFund and Tom Preston-Werner. Notable angels, including Clem Delangue & Thom Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founders), Xavier Amatriain (Google Core AI VP), and Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind VP of Research), also took part.
Generative AI is experiencing significant adoption, with spending expected to reach $143 billion by 2027. However, it faces challenges related to managing control and safety to prevent inappropriate or brand-damaging content. Additionally, upcoming regulatory efforts such as the EU AI Act and Biden’s Executive Order pose hurdles to mass enterprise adoption.
One of the top obstacles for enterprises today is evaluating the performance and reliability of generative AI applications from both safety and business perspectives. This is especially challenging when using advanced techniques like fine-tuning and RAG, maintaining LLM versions, and coordinating across teams including machine learning, governance, and business domain experts.
“The technology is not production-ready for business scenarios. Enterprise leaders are rightfully afraid of making headlines because their generative AI applications go rogue. Reputational harm keeps them up at night,” says Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder & CEO of Alinia. “Using a process known as Alignment, we ensure AI systems adhere to expected behaviors, policies, and regulatory requirements – helping enterprises seize the promise of this new technology while minimizing the risks and potential harm.”
“At Twitter, I saw firsthand the impact unintended bias of training data and ML algorithms can have on vulnerable populations, and I apply those learnings and experiences to Alinia so that other companies can increase their chances of getting generative AI right for their employees and their customers,” says Ariadna.
The Alinia Alignment Platform is designed to offer a comprehensive approach to AI governance. This includes evaluation, real-time monitoring, and advanced optimization techniques. It also provides documentation features to ensure compliance at every stage of the LLM lifecycle. The platform enables customers to obtain clear and accurate evidence of how LLM-powered applications perform in various enterprise scenarios for specific tasks while adhering to specific rules. This is the first step towards aligning AI practices with enterprise goals.
“In my experience at Hugging Face, governance and safety aspects of LLM development require an incredible amount of time and effort. But when you are about to release a foundation model that will be used millions of times, governance and safety are non-negotiables,” says Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, co-founder & COO.
Alinia is initially focused on enabling subject-matter experts to guide and validate the performance and safety of their generative AI applications. The company will use the funding to hire additional talent to build the Alinia Alignment Platform. This platform will create an end-to-end alignment process that focuses on safety and regulatory requirements, enabling the safe and inclusive use of generative AI across various modalities and languages.
