Galileo, a startup focused on evaluating AI models, has raised a $45 million Series B funding round, bringing its total investment to $68 million since it was founded three years ago. The company works with customers like Hewlett Packard, Comcast, and Twilio to test their AI tools and ensure they are functioning correctly. The startup has four products aimed at different stages of AI deployment, including training models, evaluating readiness, maintenance, and protection against threats like prompt injection.
The announcement comes as companies worldwide are racing to enhance their AI offerings, but this also comes with risks such as AI models making mistakes or leaking sensitive information. Galileo is not the only AI evaluations startup in the market, as rivals like Braintrust have also raised significant funding recently. Galileo’s founders, Vikram Chatterji and Yash Sheth, are former Google colleagues, with experience in AI product management and engineering. The company’s CTO, Atindriyo Sanyal, previously held senior AI engineering roles at Uber and Apple.
The funding round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from other investors including Premji Invest, Citibank, Databricks, and Clem Delangue, founder of AI startup Hugging Face. Andy Vitus, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, emphasized the importance of evaluation tools for corporations, as AI models are increasingly seen as brand ambassadors. Companies need to ensure their AI models do not say anything negative about their brands or reference past scandals, especially as AI agents start performing tasks for customers.
Jim Nottingham, senior vice president of advanced compute solutions at HP, revealed that HP uses Galileo’s services internally for its AI tools and also offers them to customers using HP’s AI Studio. Despite the modest $45 million funding round compared to other recent AI funding announcements, Galileo is focused on building a sustainable business without the need for massive investments in training frontier models or chip designs. Chatterji believes that it is important to only raise the necessary amount of money and create a business that can be sustainable in the long term.
Galileo’s products aim to address the challenge of assessing the performance and reliability of AI models before they are fully deployed in production. By ensuring that AI tools are not hallucinating or leaking private data, the company helps businesses overcome the barriers to full-scale AI deployment. With the growing demand for AI solutions in various industries, the need for robust evaluation tools like Galileo’s is likely to increase, as companies seek to protect their brands and ensure the accuracy and privacy of their AI models.
