A new startup called Arize AI is building what it calls a real-time analytics platform for “observability” in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The company is led by CEO Jason Lopatecki, who has also served as chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer at TubeMogul, the video ad company acquired by Adobe. TubeMogul’s co-founder and former CEO Brett Wilson is an investor and board member.
While Arize AI is only coming out of stealth today, it has already raised $4 million in funding led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Wilson and Trinity Ventures.
And it has already made an acquisition: a Y Combinator -backed startup called Monitor ML. The entire Monitor ML team is joining Arize, and its CEO Aparna Dhinakaran (who previously built machine learning infrastructure at Uber) is becoming Arize’s co-founder and chief product officer.
Lopatecki and Dhinakaran said that even when they were leading two separate startups, they were trying to solve similar problems — problems that they both saw at big companies.
“Businesses are deploying these complex models that are hard to understand, they’re not easy to troubleshoot or debug,” Lopatecki said. So if an AI or ML model isn’t delivering the desired results, “The state of the art today is: You file a ticket, the data scientist comes back with a complicated answer, everyone’s scratching their head, everyone hopes the problem’s gone away. As you push more and more models into the organization, that’s just not good enough.”
Similarly Dhinakaran said that at Uber, she saw her team spend a lot of time “answering the question, ‘Hey, is the model performing well?’ And diving into that model performance was really a tough problem.”
Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/18/tubemogul-execs-launch-arize-ai-for-ai-troublehsooting/