Vertex Ventures is a global network of operator-investors who manage portfolios in the U.S., China, Israel, India and Southeast Asia. The firm is a trusted partner to some of the world’s most innovative entrepreneurs, supporting them with unmatched operating experience and deep access to the capital, talent, partners and customers they need to build truly global businesses.

Vertex Ventures

TLV Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in Israeli entrepreneurs who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. With over $1 billion in assets under management, we invest in untapped markets and wherever breakthrough technologies may be found, including Cybersecurity, Data, AI, DevTools, Fintech, Biotech, eCommerce, and more. Driven by a passion for innovation, our team partners with the most exceptional founders and empowers them to transform their disruptive ideas into successful, category-defining companies. Since 2015, the firm has backed Israel's most promising companies, including Aqua Security, Next Insurance, Unit, Firebolt, Immunai, Granulate (acquired by Intel), Puresec (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Oribi (acquired by LinkedIn), Neosec (acquired by Akamai), and more. For more information visit www.tlv.partners.

TLV Partners

Founded in 2001, Tiger Global Management, LLC (“Tiger Global”) is a New York-based investment firm pursuing a long-term approach to investing in leading, global public and private companies that leverage technological innovation. Tiger Global’s public equity business includes fundamentally oriented long/short, long-focused and crossover strategies, targeting investments in high-quality, public growth companies. The private equity business invests in early through late stage companies that pursue innovative approaches to new and existing industries, building on over 20 years of experience investing in hundreds of businesses in more than 30 countries with more than 90 portfolio company IPOs. With a strong track record investing across sectors and stages, Tiger Global aims to be a thought partner to companies and their management teams across their lifecycle in public and private markets. The Firm’s mission is to generate world-class returns for its investors and to do so in a way that makes its employees, partners and portfolio companies proud.

Tiger Global Management

Samsung NEXT Ventures is an investment arm of Samsung NEXT, a multifaceted innovation group within Samsung Electronics dedicated to identifying new growth opportunities that will define the next decade. The firm prefers to invest in artificial intelligence, fintech, blockchain, health technology, infrastructure, and media technology sectors.

Samsung NEXT

Tal Ventures is an Israel-based Venture Capital group with deep ties to the Israel high-tech ecosystem. Tal actively pursues and supports start-up companies with experienced and aspirational leadership whose technologies can really make a difference. Tal invests horizontally across industries and vertically over various stages of development to maximize both stability and capital growth.

Tal Ventures

Aporia

Aporia is the leading AI Control Platform, trusted by both emerging tech startups and established Fortune 500 companies to guarantee the privacy, security, and reliability of AI applications. With Aporia, organizations gain robust guardrails for AI, effectively mitigating hallucinations, data leakage, and prompt attacks in real time. At the heart of the guardrails detection engine lies Aporia Labs, a team comprised of AI and cybersecurity specialists. This team is dedicated to continuously researching and developing cutting-edge methods for identifying and mitigating hallucinations and prompt attacks, ensuring the protection of your brand's reputation and the trust of your users.

Aporia offers an ML observability platform that assists developers to monitor and improve their models in production. The company is based in Israel and also has an office in California, US.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

Portkey Partners with Aporia to Bring Secure and Reliable AI Guardrails to Production

Aporia offers an ML observability platform that assists developers to monitor and improve their models in production. The company is based in Israel and also has an office in California, US.Aporia’s platform enables users to monitor for data drift, model degradation, bias, and data integrity issues, with live alerts for early issue detection. Moreover, developers can use the platform to visualize their models in production and track key metrics and areas of improvement. It also includes an explainable AI feature to discover which features impact the model predictions the most and why and to understand model predictions.Moreover, the platform incorporates observability features tailored for GenAI products. This encompasses the capability to monitor hallucinations and moderate chats, in addition to comprehensive cost tracking.The company operates through a B2B model, offering two subscription plans. It provides a free plan for starters and a tailored pricing structure for ML teams, determined by the project and the number of models in production.In July 2024, a new benchmark report revealed that Aporia Guardrails outperformed NeMo, GPT-4o, and GPT-3.5 in AI hallucination detection and latency.Key customers and partnershipsIn July 2024, Aporia partnered with Portkey AI to enhance security and reliability of generative AI applications for Portkey's users.In April 2023, Aporia partnered with AWS to provide ML observability features to AWS customers and with Databricks in May 2023 to offer ML Observability to customers using Databricks' Lakehouse Platform, AI capabilities, and MLflow offerings.Its notable customers include TechCrunch, Armis, MunichRE, BSH, Sixt, and Lemonade.Funding and financialsAporia’s latest funding round was in February 2022, when it raised USD 25 million from a Series A round led by Tiger Global, along with Samsung Next, TLV Partners, and Vertex Ventures. With the new capital, the company was to triple the team’s headcount over 2023 and expand its presence in the US and its range of use cases.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

PROMINENT_CATEGORY

<div>
 Aporia and Portkey collaborated to incorporate Aporia's LLM Guardrails into Portkey's AI Gateway. The partnership is designed to enhance the security and reliability of GenAI applications for Portkey's users through features such as hallucination mitigation, prompt injection blocking, and data leak prevention. It makes it easier for Portkey users to implement these safeguards with over 20 pre-set policies available.
 The Aporia multi-small language model detection engine claims a 98% detection rate for hallucinations, providing improved accuracy and shorter latency. This collaboration is expected to assist AI teams in moving from proof-of-concept to production by addressing key security and reliability concerns.
</div> Analyst QuickTake: 
 Aporia is making ongoing progress in AI safety measures. In <a href="https: 
//sp-edge.com/updates/27512"> March 2024 </a> , Aporia expanded its research center to create advanced strategies to reduce hallucinations, prevent data leaks, and protect sensitive information from breaches.

Aporia

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