Root Signals Secures $2.8M to Make GenAI Outputs Measurable and Reliable
Root Signals, a startup based in Helsinki and Palo Alto specializing in generative AI (GenAI) measurement with LLM-as-a-judge techniques, announced it has raised $2.8M in recent funding, enabling the company to help businesses accelerate GenAI adoption by providing them with enterprise-grade tooling to comprehensively measure, control, and monitor LLM applications.
The round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from Business Finland. Root Signals will use the funding to accelerate its platform and model development, and sales and marketing capabilities.
To safely ship GenAI-powered business applications to production, AI engineers have begun to use guardrails to block unintended behaviors. This approach controls risks but provides little capability for maximizing value. Instead, many are realizing they need to scrutinize the AI outputs with an extensive list of measurements with automations that mimic a human reviewer, according to the vendor.
Ultimately, a function this complex can only be automated by other AI models, a technique often called LLM-as-a-judge. It allows one to quantify, for example, the degree of hallucinations, relevance of replies, or regulatory compliance.
A scalable, long-term approach to this is what the company calls EvalOps. By making it easy to build and automate these complex measurements, Root Signals makes production-grade GenAI applications quantifiable, reliable, auditable, and reusable, the vendor said.
"GenAI has no built-in quality control. You cannot treat it as traditional software, but rather you need to think of it as an unreliable freelancer. You have to be pedantic in instructing it, and then check its work in seven different ways—and then check again tomorrow. We make this scalable with metrics that are understandable and easy to maintain in production. Most other power tools in this sector are overly low-level and complex, or they provide more black boxes that kick the reliability can down the road," said Dr. Ari Heljakka, founder and CEO of Root Signals.
The most eager adopters of Root Signals have been independent software vendors providing GenAI-powered vertical bots to their specific domains of expertise, AI teams of fast-moving incumbent industry players seeking to develop competitive advantage, and LLM software consultants.
With Root Signals, companies can build comprehensive metrics quickly, making detailed model-to-model comparisons easy, according to the company.
For more information about this news, visit www.rootsignals.ai.