From facial recognition to banking to medicine, artificial intelligence is becoming a more ubiquitous presence in our daily lives whether we notice it or not. Along with that spread comes the more insidious concern that left unchecked, the technology could have seriously negative ramifications.
For example, multiple states have limited the use of facial recognition technology out of concerns for bias, hiring and recruiting tools have been sunsetted for being unfair to certain candidates and autonomous vehicle companies are now being faced with life and death decisions on the road.
Enter San Francisco-based ethical AI startup Credo AI. The company has developed a platform for monitoring AI systems, automating compliance and risk assessment and guiding users through local regulations as they evolve.
The company officially launched on Tuesday after operating in stealth for the past year and a half and it has raised $5.5 million in total funding from Decibel, the AI FUND and Village Global. Credo AI declined to disclose how many customers it currently has but said clients include multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Over the past several years, co-founder and CEO Navrina Singh began to realize that there was a lack of oversight in the world of artificial intelligence and a disconnect between the different stakeholders responsible for developing and managing AI systems.
Singh and co-founder Eli Chen, the startup's CTO, are both trained engineers with extensive tech industry experience. Singh previously worked as a director of product management at both Qualcomm and Microsoft, where she oversaw the software giant's speech recognition program. Chen has worked as an engineer at Sun Microsystems and engineering manager at both Netflix and Twitter.
Their industry experience led the team to understand that building products at scale can create unintended consequences with outcomes that might not be good or fair — or even legal. Credo AI attempts to mitigate that risk by providing what Singh calls “continuous governance” on three levels: the product side, the business side and the regulatory side. The startup currently provides its services in five industries that operate in heavily regulated environments: banking and finance, human resources, government, insurance and technology like facial recognition.
The company's platform works by creating an auditable log of the work that goes into creating an AI-based system, an approach Singh says helps to align the multiple functions of a company working with the system from policy to product.
“AI truly is one of those destructive forces that needs a lot of nurturing and accountability and oversight,” Singh said. “I am a strong believer that right now it is becoming one of the enterprise priorities, not only because of the board and C-level focus, but because there is such a huge opportunity, as well as unintended consequences. The next frontier on the hallmark of trusted brands is going to be good governance.”
Singh wants the Credo AI team, currently at 15 mostly full-time staffers, to be part of this conversation.
“What’s next for us is really being heads down and delivering on our customer promise which is, how do we bring order to this AI governance space? We are growing by leaps and bounds. We have a very strong pipeline of customers," Singh said. "For us it’s really building trust with them so that they can build trust with the AI and deliver on the promise of machine learning to their consumers.”
