SCB 10X, the disruptive technology investment arm of SCB X Group, has announced its participation in the US$7.5 million seed funding round for Guardrails AI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) assurance company.
The round was led by Zetta Venture Partners, with participation from SCB 10X, Bloomberg Beta, Pear VC, GitHub Fund, and AI angels Lip-Bu Tan, Ian Goodfellow and Logan Kilpatrick.
Funding is expected to expand the company's engineering and product teams, and advance its products, solidifying Guardrails AI as the leading platform for enterprises and developers to build safer, more reliable AI applications.
Guardrails AI provides tools to measure, monitor and mitigate AI risks. The company developed a unique approach to address the large language model (LLM) reliability problem and mitigate risks of unintended consequences by introducing a governance layer that validates and corrects AI application outputs.
"The breakthroughs in generative AI have created an inflection point for mass enterprise adoption. As part of a group committed to becoming an AI-first organisation, SCB 10X understands how transformative AI is in driving an enterprise's value. But to reap the impact of generative AI, we need to understand the limitations and risks inherent in the technology, such as the tendencies for LLMs to hallucinate, and how to overcome them," said Mukaya Panich, chief executive and chief venture and investment officer of SCB 10X.
"Guardrails AI is a game-changer as its suite of validation tools unlocks a critical roadblock for adoption, enabling companies to customise and enforce their safety and compliance standards in their AI workflows. We see Guardrails AI as the blueprint for safe and ethical AI innovation."
Guardrails Hub is an open-source platform that allows developers to build, share and reuse output validation techniques or "validators". The Hub has a growing collection of more than 50 pre-built validators crowdsourced by the developer community, including the SCB 10X R&D team, which is developing Typhoon, a series of Thai open-source LLMs that significantly outperform existing Thai LLMs in the market.
SCB 10X contributed a validator to Guardrails Hub to ensure an LLM output is produced in the intended language. The seed funding and work with Guardrails Hub underscore SCB 10X's conviction in trustworthy and safe AI innovation, said Ms Mukaya.