Alinia AI Gains $2.4M In Funding To Ensure Generative AI Deployment Safety

Alinia AI, a platform dedicated to the safe and controlled deployment of generative AI, has announced a successful $2.4 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Speedinvest and Precursor, with participation from KFund and Tom Preston-Werner. Notable angels such as Clem Delangue and Thom Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founders), Xavier Amatriain (Google Core AI VP), and Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind VP of Research) also contributed.

The adoption of generative AI is accelerating, with spending projected to reach $143 billion by 2027. However, this rapid adoption presents significant challenges, including managing control and safety to prevent inappropriate or brand-damaging content. Upcoming regulatory efforts like the EU AI Act and Biden's Executive Order add further hurdles to enterprise adoption.

Evaluating the performance and reliability of generative AI applications from both safety and business perspectives is a primary challenge for enterprises. This is particularly difficult when leveraging advanced techniques like fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), maintaining large language model (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 and CEO of Alinia. "Using a process known as Alignment, we ensure AI systems adhere to expected behaviours, policies, and regulatory requirements – helping enterprises seize the promise of this new technology while minimising the risks and potential harm."

Ariadna further explains that her experience at Twitter highlighted the impact unintended bias in training data and machine learning algorithms can have on vulnerable populations. She applies these learnings to Alinia to help other companies increase their chances of getting generative AI right for their employees and customers.

Alinia's Comprehensive Approach

The Alinia Alignment Platform aims to provide an integral AI governance approach ranging from evaluation and real-time monitoring to advanced optimisation techniques. It also includes documentation features that facilitate compliance at every stage of the LLM lifecycle. Enabling customers to have clear evidence of how LLM-powered applications behave in different enterprise scenarios for specific tasks is the first step towards alignment for enterprises.

"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 and COO.

Future Plans

With an initial focus on enabling subject-matter experts to guide and validate the performance and safety of their generative AI applications, Alinia will use the funding to hire additional talent. The goal is to build the Alinia Alignment Platform to create an end-to-end alignment process focused on safety and regulatory requirements – enabling safe and inclusive use of generative AI across LLM modalities and languages.