AI evaluation start-up Maxim AI raises $3M from Elevation Capital to help enterprises test and rapidly ship AI products
Mountain View, CA
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June 18, 2024 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Maxim AI, an enterprise-grade evaluation and observability platform for AI applications, announced a $3M funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from marquee angel investors including founders of Postman, Chargebee, Groww, Razorpay, Media.net, among others. With the infusion of capital, Maxim announced the General Availability (GA) launch of their platform, marking a significant milestone in their journey.
With the recent explosion of large language models, the race to build & deploy AI applications has intensified. Traditionally, software was built in a deterministic paradigm with standardised best practices for predictably testing performance and systematically improving products, tightly integrated into the development lifecycle. Generative AI products, however, are getting built in a non-deterministic paradigm with unpredictable variability in quality and performance depending on factors including models, parameters, data or context, or simply the framing of the question. Moreover, challenges around hallucinations, inaccuracies, safety, and output structure lead to compromised user experiences and reputational risks for organisations. Organisations are resorting to non-scalable techniques, high-paid manual effort, and tediously slow iteration cycles as they test and ship their AI into production.
Founded in 2023 by Google-Postman duo Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo who collectively bring over a decade of experience in building AI and developer-focused tools, Maxim aims to bring the best practices of traditional software development to streamline AI development workflows.
Maxim’s infrastructure, which sits between the foundational model and application layers of the AI stack, is deeply focused on AI developers who comprise the traditional AI/ML engineers as well as the emerging class of backend engineers now leading AI development across organizations. The Maxim stack provides end-to-end AI evaluation across the development lifecycle: right from prompt engineering, pre-release and post-release testing for quality and functionality, to data management and fine-tuning. While the automated evaluation platform by itself helps teams ship products >5x faster, the platform also offers the critical last-mile for evaluation including support for human evaluation as well as custom datasets and models.
“Even though we are seeing tremendous value creation in the AI hardware and foundational model stack, for the benefits to be realized meaningfully up the value chain, we need the products built on top of the generative AI stack to be trustworthy and reliable. This makes evaluation a very critical piece of AI infrastructure. However, today there is no standardization in the generative AI testing space unlike traditional software development. That’s where Maxim comes in: with our users, we have become this very core piece of infrastructure that is powering high quality AI development, streamlining team collaboration, and saving development teams hundreds of hours per month, ” said Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo said in a joint statement.
Talking about the investment Akarsh Shrivastava, Principal, Elevation Capital said, “Maxim AI is addressing a crucial need in the evolving AI landscape. Their focus on creating a standardized, scalable evaluation infrastructure addresses a deep pain point for AI developers. As the complexity and diversity of AI use cases continue to rise, Maxim's platform will play a critical role in ensuring trustworthy and reliable AI systems. We are super excited to partner with Vaibhavi and Akshay as they build Maxim into a critical piece of this AI catalyzed paradigm shift we are going to see.”
So far, in private beta, the company has attracted multiple global customers who are at the forefront of the AI revolution. Looking ahead, Maxim is committed to expanding its platform capabilities including proprietary domain-specific evaluations for quality and security as well as its data engine to accelerate reliable and scalable deployment of AI products. The company plans to use the funds to expand its world-class team and scale its operations to partner with more leading enterprises building AI products.
About Maxim AI
Founded by Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo, professionals with over a decade in AI and developer tools at top technology firms (including Google, Postman, and Slack), Maxim AI is the generative AI evaluation and observability platform for modern AI teams. It streamlines the entire AI development lifecycle from design to production, enabling faster, reliable, and high quality deployment of AI across organizations.
About Elevation Capital
Elevation Capital is a leading venture capital firm that provides seed and early-stage capital for emerging companies in India. Having invested in India since 2002, Elevation has deployed over $2.6 Bn of capital in 190+ companies. The firm announced its eighth pool of capital of $670 million in April 2022. Co-led by Managing Partners Ravi Adusumalli and Mukul Arora, along with Partners Mridul Arora and Mayank Khanduja, the firm has invested across Consumer Internet, SaaS, Fintech, Consumer Brands, Edtech, Healthtech and Deeptech. Elevation Capital has offices in Bengaluru and Gurgaon.
Contact Details
Maxim AI
Bilal Mahmood
+44 7714 007257
b.mahmood@stockwoodstrategy.com
Company Website
