Transparent, responsible AI that enterprises can trust: Why we’re backing Apres

U.S. and Portugal-based Apres this week announced the closing of a $1.5 million seed round to bring its explainable AI solution to market. We at Adara are delighted to back co-founders Matt, Subbu and the Apres team alongside Faber Ventures, Techstars and local angels.

The Problem: Enterprise AI adoption is constrained by a lack of transparency

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the modern enterprise yet adoption is constrained due to an inherent lack of trust.

Enterprise interest in Artificial Intelligence is booming, with analysts predicting annual spend will grow to $110B by 2024. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that investment is lost as over 87% of the models developed today will never make it into a production environment. For the models that are successfully deployed, Enterprises report exceptionally high error rates.

In short, large enterprises want to use AI to unlock value for their customers but don’t yet fully deploy because they don’t trust why a decision was generated by a model. Success is rare and the failures are destructive (see: Twitter’s racism, JP Morgan’s discrimination, Apple’s bias).

The Solution: Explainable AI that Enterprises can trust

Apres was founded to unlock the promise of AI by radically improving accessibility for both technical and non-technical users, making responsible AI the better business decision:

1. To ensure model success by translating AI behavior into a language everyone can understand.
2. To reduce error and eliminate bias by communicating model gaps to the right people, at the right time.
3. To reduce spend by automating the reporting Enterprises need to trust models.

The Apres platform makes it simple to integrate existing models to deliver rich explanations and interpretations. Building beyond first-generation explainability, Apres contextualizes each slice of data and model decision relative to business goals. This creates a common language for non-technical and technical teams to communicate success.

In turn, Apres keeps humans in the loop via a user friendly interface where they can provide expert feedback that further enrich Apres interpretations and reporting. These results are then made available on-demand via a web application, flexible API, and integrations.

Our 8th investment from AVIII, our 1st in Portugal

The Apres team are the perfect example of the type of exceptional team we want to partner with. Their deep domain expertise and ambitious vision impressed us during our many interactions we are excited to join them on their mission to make AI more trustworthy.

Apres represents our first investment in Portugal from our third fund. Parabéns a todos!