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 including Hewlett Packard, Comcast, and Twilio to test their AI tools, ensuring they are functioning properly and not giving out private data. Galileo offers four products: Fine Tune, Evaluate, Observe, and Protect, to help companies train, test, maintain, and protect their AI models. In July, the company released Luna, its own language model for evaluating the performance of other models, including data privacy and bias detection.
The announcement comes as companies worldwide race to enhance their AI offerings, but the pitfalls of AI models making mistakes or leaking sensitive information are a growing concern. Galileo faces competition from other AI evaluation startups, such as Braintrust, who recently raised a $36 million Series A. Galileo’s co-founders, Vikram Chatterji and Yash Sheth, both former Google employees, bring their experience in AI product management and engineering to the company. Chatterji believes that evaluation tools are crucial for corporations as AI models become brand ambassadors and need oversight to protect the company’s reputation.
The funding round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Premji Invest and other venture firms. Andy Vitus, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, emphasizes the importance of evaluation tools for businesses deploying AI agents to perform tasks for customers. He believes that AI models will soon be seen as brand ambassadors and need oversight to prevent saying negative things about the company. HP, one of Galileo’s customers, uses their services internally for its AI tools and includes them in their AI Studio subscription suite for developers.
Although Galileo’s funding round is modest compared to other recent AI investments, the company focuses on evaluating existing AI models rather than training large-scale models that require significant resources. Chatterji believes in building a sustainable business that only requires the necessary amount of funding to operate effectively. As companies continue to integrate AI into their products and services, the need for evaluation tools to ensure the performance, privacy, and security of AI models will become increasingly essential. Galileo aims to be the go-to solution for companies looking to deploy AI tools successfully.
