Seeding our mission and our customers – why we raised

AI Governance & Assurance

From the beginning, our mission at Monitaur has been to improve people's lives by building trust and confidence in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) systems. In 2020 and 2021, news coverage, documentaries, and research have highlighted unfair AI and gaps in proper governance of new technology. This moment of funding is an excellent validation of the importance and timeliness of that mission.

We raised money because we are gaining support not only from our fantastic customers, but from the market at large. We want to move more quickly to meet those needs, and this seed funding gives us the ability to do exactly that by expanding our team and solutions.

What brought us here

To date, we have focused on delivering software that establishes the foundation of a well-governed, assured ML system. We offer solutions that establish model documentation, transparency, verifiability, auditability, monitoring, and validations to mitigate risk. We are going to use this money to further develop independent model and data validations in particular around bias, to accelerate our risk and control frameworks and governance tools, and to invest in building community around our platform.

Since Launching Monitaur in early 2020 as part of Techstars, we've obsessed on building the best set of core capabilities to establish assurances of ML systems with a foundation of transparency. Without that foundation, companies simply cannot understand much of what happens inside the black boxes they are running. So we focused on providing that technological infrastructure that became our Record, Audit, and Monitor products.

Now and next

We have spoken with a broad range of companies deploying high stakes AI and ML that make consequential decisions directly affecting people's lives. Those companies have ranged from highly regulated global enterprises in healthcare and financial services to startups trying to disrupt those industries with new technology. 

As our conversations progressed, we found that the insurance industry in particular was leaning in to ask for help to build more equitable, fair, transparent, and compliant systems. The entire industry of carriers, regulators, and consumers is excited about the potential for AI to bring new and better insurance products to market. However, there are – and rightfully so – deep concerns and skepticism about how these systems can be run responsibly with the oversight that internal and external stakeholders expect.

As one example, we earned the trust of one of the leading insurance companies and consumer brands in the country, Progressive Insurance. Progressive has a set of core values that demand their commitment to innovating responsibly. Like our other relationships, they aren’t just a customer, but a partner. We want customers who share our mission, actively contribute feedback, and push us.

We also earned the respect of one of the most respected regulators in the country, Jillian Froment, former director of the Ohio State Department of Insurance, who is now a member of our board of advisors. We recognized early on that if we want to truly achieve our mission, we needed to actively and intentionally partner with regulators to understand their priorities, challenges and needs. We absolutely apply those learnings into what we build – you can’t really deliver governance and assurance for insurance carriers otherwise.

It takes a village…

Thanks to our customers, thought partners, investors, families, and all of the people that know how hard it is to build a company. Raising money by itself isn’t really an accomplishment without achieving the results we set out to achieve. We raised money because we are committed to being the best possible partner to companies committed to building proactive governance and assurance into their AI strategies. They believe in our mission and products – and we won't let them down.