Alinia raises $2.4M in pre-seed funding to enable safe & controlled deployment of generative AI

Alinia AI, an alignment platform enabling companies’ safe and controlled deployment of generative AI, guided by their policies and business preferences, announces a successful $2.4M pre-Seed funding round. Speedinvest and Precursor led the round with participation from KFund and notable angels including Clem Délangue & Thom Wolf (Hugging Face Co-Founders), Tom Preston (GitHub Co-Founder), Xavier Amatriain (Google Core AI VP), and Oriol Vinyals (Google DeepMind VP of Research).

Significant adoption of generative AI is underway with spending set to hit $143 billion by 2027, but its rapid
adoption comes with significant challenges. The problem? Managing control and safety in the face of risks to
prevent inappropriate or brand-damaging content. Additionally, navigating upcoming regulatory efforts like
the EU AI Act, Biden´s Executive Order, or Canada´s Bill C-27, which demand rigorous safety checks and clear documentation, also adds hurdles to mass enterprise adoption.

Evaluating the performance and reliability of generative AI applications from both safety and business dimensions is a top obstacle for the enterprise today. This is especially challenging for companies when leveraging advanced techniques like fine-tuning and RAG, maintaining LLM versions, and coordinating across teams including machine learning, governance, and business domain experts.

“The technology is not production-ready for business scenarios. Enterprise leaders are rightfully afraid of making headlines because their generative AI applications go rogue. Reputational harm keeps them up at night,” says Ariadna Font Llitjós, co-founder & CEO of Alinia. “Using a process known as Alignment, we ensure AI systems adhere to expected behaviors, policies, and regulatory requirements – helping enterprises seize the promise of this new technology while minimizing the risks and potential harm.”

“At Twitter, I saw firsthand the impact unintended bias of training data and ML algorithms can have on vulnerable populations, and I apply those learnings and experiences to Alinia so that other companies can increase their chances of getting generative AI right for their employees and their customers,” says Ariadna.

Alinia Alignment Platform aims to provide an integral AI governance approach – which currently requires multiple tools – ranging from evaluation and real-time monitoring to cutting-edge optimization techniques, coupled with documentation features facilitating compliance at every stage of the LLM lifecycle. Enabling customers to have clear and accurate evidence of how LLM-powered applications behave in different enterprise scenarios, for specific tasks, and abiding by specific rules, is the first step towards alignment for the enterprise.

“In my experience at Hugging Face, governance and safety aspects of LLM development require an incredible amount of time and effort. But when you are about to release a foundation model that will be used millions of times, governance and safety are non-negotiables,” says Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, co-founder & COO.

With an initial focus on enabling subject-matter experts to guide and validate the performance and safety of their generative AI applications, Alinia will use the funding to hire additional talent to build the Alinia Alignment Platform to create an end-to-end alignment process focused on safety and regulatory requirements – enabling safe and inclusive use of generative AI across LLM modalities and languages.

Fred Hagenauer, Partner with Speedinvest, says: “Ari and Carlos have some of the best profiles we’ve seen to tackle the alignment problem in the generative AI space. Their experience and knowledge of the early days of enterprise AI, RAI, and the LLM governance required today is something truly unique. For us, it was a no-brainer to be the first ones to support them.”

Charles Hudson, Managing Partner with Precursor Ventures, says: “Alinia brings the confidence that enterprise lacks today to deploy generative AI in a safe and trustworthy way. Being able to control and steer these powerful agents is such a challenge, but they have the experience needed and are willing to take it head-on.”

Oriol Vinyals (VP Research, Google DeepMind): “The safe development and use of powerful machine learning models should be of concern to all, and diversity is key in this field. That is why it is so important that Ari and Carlos are addressing this highly nuanced challenge with Alinia. They bring a unique and rich perspective to the AI alignment space."

Xavier Amatriain, VP AI Product, Google, says: “The founding team's background on responsible AI, Ari's long run on enterprise AI, and Carlos's focus on LLM governance are what make Alinia unique. ML, product, and governance expertise and experience make a very much needed winner combo in generative AI.”

Tom Prestner, Co-Founder, GitHub, says: “Alinia comes at the right moment in time. The majority of companies are still in the experimentation phase, playing with LLMs internally for non-critical business ops. This will change soon.”

Thom Wolf (CSO & co-founder, Hugging Face): "Aligning the deployment of generative AI with regulatory requirements and providing the evidence of it to different parties, like authorities or partners, is a key differentiator from Carlos & Ari.”

About Speedinvest:

Speedinvest, one of the most active Seed investors in European tech unicorns, has more than €1 billion in AuM and 40+ investors based in Berlin, London, Munich, Paris, and Vienna. The fund’s dedicated sector-focused teams are the first to fund Europe's most innovative pre-Seed and Seed tech startups, and their in-house operational experts support portfolio companies with growth, people (HR), market expansion, and more throughout every stage of their journeys. Wefox, Bitpanda, GoStudent, Wayflyer, Open, CoachHub, Schüttflix, TourRadar, Adverity, and TWAICE are among their portfolio of 300+ companies. Learn more at www.speedinvest.com.

About Precursor:

Precursor Ventures is a pioneering pre-seed venture capital firm based in San Francisco. With over $200 million under management, the firm invests in startups building the next generation of software and hardware companies. The Precursor portfolio includes Incredible Health, Juniper Square, Carrot Fertility, Bobbie Baby, Pair Eyewear, Modern Health, and many other leading companies. The firm invests in 30-40 new companies yearly and has invested in over 400 since inception. Learn more at https://precursorvc.com.