Openlayer Inc., the creator of a successful platform designed to test artificial intelligence and machine learning models, recently secured $4.8 million in seed funding. The funding round was led by Quiet Capital and other investors included Picus Capital, YCombinator, Hack VC, Liquid2 Ventures, Mantis VC and angel investors such as Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.
The founders of Openlayer Inc., Gabriel Bayomi, Rishab Ramanathan, and Vikas Nair, are former Apple Inc. machine learning engineers. Openlayer provides developers with a reliable way to test machine learning models which are largely probabilistic. While there are other software testing platforms which exist, they are designed for more deterministic systems in which the input and output are defined and can be predicted in advance.
Openlayer features several capabilities to help teams improve their models and datasets. These include verifying the integrity of training and validation datasets, surfacing meaningful discrepancies between training and production data, measuring model performance, tracking different models and datasets to compare their performance, guaranteeing fairness of models, and generating synthetic data to inject noise.
Constellation Research Vice President Andy Thurai commented that while generative AI bots are gaining more attention recently, there is a real need for effective tools for testing, security and validation. Openlayer’s verification options, ability to surface discrepancies between different datasets, and model performance measurement capabilities are unique and valuable.
Openlayer, Inc. plans to use the funding to expand their team, improve the functionality of their platform, and add guardrails for users. Their long-term goal is to have Openlayer become the go-to hub for any team building new models.
Mike Krieger is a successful entrepreneur and the co-founder of Instagram. After leaving Instagram, he has become an active angel investor. He was part of Openlayer’s seed round as an investor.
Max Mullen is a founder and executive at Instacart, an online grocery delivery business. Before co-founding Instacart, he worked at Google as a Software Engineer. He was an angel investor in Openlayer’s seed round.
