Pramaana Labs gets 27M in funding

Artificial intelligence has become a significant component of many businesses, but reliability remains a challenge.

Pramaana Labs, a new startup, aims to address this issue by leveraging mathematical formalization to bring formal verification to AI, combining one of computer science’s most reliable systems with one of its most chaotic. Khosla Ventures led a $27 million seed funding round for Pramaana Labs, with participation from Accel, BoldCap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound.

Deploying AI in highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation requires stronger protections against errors than currently exist. Ranjan Rajagopalan, Pramaana co-founder and CEO, believes that these areas are uniquely suited to formalization, noting that the rules of the tax code are similar to math, with many rules that must be followed, making it easier to apply formal verification.

Pramaana’s system uses a conventional LLM engine, which provides flexibility in answering natural language questions and tackling complex problems, and they add a deterministic layer on top of the LLM to ensure the results are accurate. This combination of LLM and deterministic verification is not new.

Rajagopalan believes that the world’s hardest problems are not unsolvable, but rather unformalized, and the company aims to make AI systems more reliable and trustworthy by applying formal verification.

Formal verification has real precedent, with it being used in various fields, including the CATALA project in France, which formalizes the country’s tax and benefit system into executable code.

Pramaana’s focus on formal verification is a significant step towards making AI more reliable and trustworthy, and as the use of AI becomes more widespread, the need for formal verification will become increasingly important.

The development of Pramaana’s formal verification systems will help to build trust in AI systems and enable their wider adoption in sensitive industries, such as those that require secure data management and protection.

In the long term, Pramaana aims to make AI more reliable and trustworthy, and the company’s unique approach, combined with its experienced team and strong funding, makes it an interesting player in the AI industry.

For now, Pramaana is focusing on developing its systems.