AI app evaluation platform Maxim AI raises $3 mn led by Elevation Capital
Maxim AI founders Vaibhavi Gangwar (right) and Akshay Deo
Maxim AI, an enterprise-grade evaluation and observability platform for AI applications, announced a $3 million funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from marquee angel investors, including founders of Postman, Chargebee, Groww, Razorpay, and Media.net, among others.
The company plans to use the funds to expand its team and scale its operations to partner with more leading enterprises building AI products.
Founded in 2023 by Google-Postman duo Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo, who collectively bring over a decade of experience in building AI and developer-focused tools, Maxim aims to bring the best practices of traditional software development to streamline AI development workflows.
With the recent explosion of large language models, the race to build and deploy AI applications has intensified. Traditionally, software was built in a deterministic paradigm with standardised best practices for predictably testing performance and systematically improving products, tightly integrated into the development lifecycle. Generative AI products, however, are being built in a non-deterministic paradigm with unpredictable variability in quality and performance depending on factors including models, parameters, data or context, or simply the framing of the question. Moreover, challenges around hallucinations, inaccuracies, safety, and output structure lead to compromised user experiences and reputational risks for organisations. Organisations are resorting to non-scalable techniques, high-paid manual effort, and tediously slow iteration cycles as they test and ship their AI into production.
Maxim’s infrastructure, which sits between the foundational model and application layers of the AI stack, is deeply focused on AI developers who comprise the traditional AI/ML engineers as well as the emerging class of backend engineers now leading AI development across organisations. The Maxim stack provides end-to-end AI evaluation across the development lifecycle: right from prompt engineering, pre-release and post-release testing for quality and functionality, to data management and fine-tuning.
“Even though we are seeing tremendous value creation in the AI hardware and foundational model stack, for the benefits to be realised meaningfully up the value chain, we need the products built on top of the generative AI stack to be trustworthy and reliable. This makes evaluation a very critical piece of AI infrastructure. However, today there is no standardisation in the generative AI testing space unlike traditional software development. That’s where Maxim comes in: with our users, we have become this very core piece of infrastructure that is powering high-quality AI development, streamlining team collaboration, and saving development teams hundreds of hours per month,” Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo said in a joint statement.
Talking about the investment, Akarsh Shrivastava, principal, Elevation Capital, said, “Maxim AI is addressing a crucial need in the evolving AI landscape. Their focus on creating a standardised, scalable evaluation infrastructure addresses a deep pain point for AI developers. As the complexity and diversity of AI use cases continue to rise, Maxim’s platform will play a critical role in ensuring trustworthy and reliable AI systems.”
So far, in private beta, the company has attracted multiple global customers who are at the forefront of the AI revolution. Looking ahead, Maxim is committed to expanding its platform capabilities, including proprietary domain-specific evaluations for quality and security, as well as its data engine to accelerate the reliable and scalable deployment of AI products.
First Published: Jun 18 2024 | 8:52 PM IST