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Tel Aviv-based startup Citrusx, founded two years ago, has emerged from stealth mode and announced raising $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Canadian VC firm Awz with help from several angel investors. Citrusx focuses on making AI technology more explainable and accessible. Their end-to-end platform helps business stakeholders understand AI models and assess their performance accurately.
As global interest in AI regulation grows, Citrusx aims to demystify AI beyond data science teams, ensuring everyone involved has a clear understanding of AI operations, helping to meet both internal and regulatory compliance standards.
Citrusx is simplifying AI understanding for businesses. While AI accelerates operations, saves money, and enhances customer experiences, deploying AI models involves several steps, including input from non-technical teams like validation, risk, and legal departments. This process, often complicated by technical knowledge gaps, can delay projects by 6-9 months, impacting business and revenue.
Noa Srebrnik, previously with the Bank of Israel and the finance ministry, recognized this issue before the surge of generative AI. In 2021, she founded Citrusx to build an all-encompassing platform for AI validation and explainability. This platform allows all stakeholders to understand, verify, and manage AI models easily to ensure robustness and fairness, as per regulatory standards.
The platform offers comprehensive reports detailing a model’s function, performance, and potential business impacts, covering the entire AI lifecycle from development to production. It provides validation metrics for model stability and accuracy, identifies vulnerabilities, and offers tools for regulatory compliance. Once in production, the platform continuously monitors for drifts, explains new predictions, and suggests risk mitigation steps.
Citrusx acts as a bridge connecting AI models to the entire company, facilitating smoother, faster deployment and maintenance while meeting regulatory demands. During its stealth phase, Citrusx worked with some publicly listed companies in regulated industries like finance and security, although specific details remain undisclosed. Their patent-pending technology promises 100% transparency and 82% faster production times, enhancing AI investment returns.
As a Canadian bank working with Citrusx noted, “Collaborating across departments and managing multiple deployment models demands seamless communication, and that’s where Citrusx comes in. Its real-time report generation provides high-level insights about models which can be shared between model developers and oversight teams to provide a level of confidence and transparency in the model development process.”
With increasing AI regulations worldwide, tools like Citrusx are crucial. Recently, U.S. President Biden issued an executive order for new AI safety and security standards, and the E.U. finalized a first-of-its-kind AI act. Tools helping teams build safer, more robust AI, like Citrusx, are therefore becoming essential. Other notable players in this space include London-based Context, backed by Google Ventures, and California’s Arize AI with its open-source library for monitoring large language models.
The market is growing, and more companies are likely to join this trend soon.