After leading $ 150 million investment in Unicorn Check last night, the New York hedge fund is realizing its new vision for 2022 – an early-stage investment. Tiger Global is leading a $ 25 million investment in Israeli start-up Aporia, the Israeli company that has developed a platform for monitoring and tracking faults in artificial intelligence-based systems. Samsung Next also took part in the round, along with existing investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures. Since its inception, the company has raised a total of $ 30 million.
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In a conversation with Calcalist, Liran Hasson, CEO and founder of Aporia, said that “when you look at AI, it’s everywhere. And like all software, it also has bugs, and sometimes it does not work properly. But faults in it can come at a very high price, like a system that will filter out candidates of one sex or cancel credit to others. Our system detects such faults and corrects them. For example, a case where our product is installed at a financial customer who puts out loans and uses AI to check if a particular person can get a loan. If one of the information providers was not available at the time of the check, and therefore the loan applicant did not have a credit history, he refuses. That is, without a system like ours it would take a long time to identify the fault. Our system shortens the time frame and warns that the information on credit history has not arrived. “
One of the main problems facing the system is the issue of discrimination and diversity. Hasson: “Systems sometimes create discrimination – such as between men and women or between a certain age group – and our system knows how to identify them. Detecting discrimination is a major issue in US banks.”
Hasson, CEO and co-founder of Aporia, founded and managed several projects in his youth, including independent development of a new programming language in Hebrew and a system for biometric identification according to the iris, as part of the Weizmann Institute’s excellence program. He led a team that won the Israel Defense Award In Unit 81, he was one of the first employees at Adallom, and after it was acquired by Microsoft, he joined the investment team of Vertex Ventures.
The current capital raising will enable Aphoria to continue to accelerate its development and growth processes and expand into additional markets. In addition, the company, which currently employs 20 people, plans to triple its workforce by the end of 2022 and recruit dozens of workers in Israel and the U.S. “We have 20 workers today and we will recruit more workers in the coming year. We must – and we will recruit – sales people in the United States, a marketing team and a product team, and we recruit in the entire field. We will reach 65-60 employees globally by the end of the year. “There is a huge demand coming to us, and I have to support it,” Hasson said.
Regarding working with Tiger Global, Hasson added: “I do not know if this is part of their strategy. We finished the round a few weeks ago, met them and were in talks with other funds as well. They saw the business momentum in the company and understood the huge growth potential. “AI will need us. The amount they invest will allow us to grow aggressively and leverage it. I used to work at Vortex, and saw a lot of companies, and it was very important to me to build a healthy business that really sells and that employees believe in.”
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Alon Govkin and Liran Hasson, aphoria directors
(Dear Shukron)
Tools for monitoring the performance of AI models are a critical part of the transformation processes that organizations go through, and according to a Markets & Markets study, the AI infrastructure market is expected to grow to $ 79.3 billion by 2026. However, according to research and consulting firm Gartner, about two-thirds of AI projects Fail, due to data quality issues – which can sometimes lead to an organizational crisis. For example, Amazon’s AI-based recruiting tool was found to be discriminatory against women. This is in light of the company’s computerized models, which were programmed to sort candidates by viewing certain patterns, which were submitted to the company over ten years, and most of which came from men. In other cases, AI errors have led to huge financial damage, as in the case of the real estate trading company Zillow, whose AI system incorrectly predicted home prices and led to losses of hundreds of millions of dollars per company. These examples illustrate the need for a technological solution. It has the power to continuously ensure the reliability of AI systems, in all changing environmental conditions, to provide information and data on the performance of machine learning models, and to quickly and in real time detect anomalies and malfunctions in model performance.
The system developed by Aporia helps companies take responsibility for the insights of the AI systems they operate. The company’s system knows how to identify whether the models meet the organization’s business goals, and detects anomalies at an early stage (biased forecasts, unexpected changes in format or a decrease in model performance over time). The system also provides practical insights, which help data scientists in a short time. In addition, Ephoria’s solution provides transparency to the black box of AI models, as well as provides explanations regarding the models’ decision considerations – an issue required both from a regulatory point of view, such as rejecting a US loan application, and from a business point of view. The AI of the organization, through modular adjustment as needed for each case and model in the organization.
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John Curtis, partner in the Tiger Global Foundation
(Photo: Uriel Cohen)
Tiger Global, which led the recruitment, is one of the most prominent high-tech investors. The fund was established in 2001 and manages more than $ 90 billion. The fund has invested in many well-known companies such as Uber, Spotify, AirBnb, and Databricks. According to John Curtis, a partner at Tiger Global Management, “Since its inception, Euphoria has shown an incredible growth rate, and it has quickly become a leader in ML. Managers in global organizations understand the benefits of artificial intelligence and its impact on all industries, but because of the risks they are “It is difficult to sleep at night. The solution of euphoria will ensure organizations responsible use of their artificial intelligence models.”