Relyance AI Inc., developer of a governance platform that provides visibility and control over enterprise-wide data, today announced a $32.1 million Series B funding round.
The four-year-old startup, which secured a $30 million funding round in 2021, plans to use the money to scale up operations and address the rapidly growing demand for more transparency around the training and use of artificial intelligence models. Relyance is addressing the need for organizations to better understand where their data lives and how it is used in a climate of increasing regulation.
A recent study by Precisely, formerly Syncsort Inc., found that only 12% of 565 data and analytics professionals surveyed said their data is of sufficient quality and accessibility for effective use in AI. Two-thirds said they don’t completely trust the data they rely on for decisions. More than one-quarter of the Fortune 500 identified AI regulation as a risk in annual reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Relyance said the core of the problem is that privacy and security have been seen as separate challenges, with privacy teams being unaware of whether their commitment to regulations and customers is being met, while security teams typically don’t know what data should be in AI models.
Data inventory
Relyance’s technology scans all of an organization’s data, including in applications, AI models and code repositories, and compares them to policies stated in the company’s contracts and regulations.
Continuous source code analysis captures the logic governing data at the code level. Runtime infrastructure monitoring tracks the data flow to live systems. Data is tracked as it’s stored and routed to third parties, and machine learning algorithms scan regulatory and contractual obligations to compare them to the status of data in the organization.
By providing real-time visibility into data flows across the application stack, including microservices and machine learning pipelines, the company says it can enable instant alerts for potential risks. It says it can also reduce the manual effort required in assessing risk by 80%.
“It’s impossible to keep up with the current state of regulations, especially when GDPR, HIPAA, the EU’s AI Act and a mosaic of local U.S. privacy laws are all different and sometimes at odds,” co-founder and Chief Executive Abhi Sharma said in a statement.
Relyance AI said it increased its enterprise customer base by 30% in the first half of this year and expects to double its annual recurring revenue in 2024, though it didn’t provide more specifics.
Thomvest Ventures Inc. led the round with participation by Microsoft Corp.’s M12 Ventures Fund, Cheyenne Ventures Management LLC and existing investors Menlo Ventures Management L.P. and Integrity Venture Partners LLC d/b/a Unusual Ventures.