SCB 10X, the disruptive technology investment arm of SCBX Group, announced their participation in the $7.5 million seed funding round for Guardrails AI, a San Francisco-based AI assurance company. This round was led by Zetta Venture Partners, with participation from SCB 10X, Bloomberg Beta, Pear VC, GitHub Fund, and AI angels Lip-Bu Tan, Ian Goodfellow, and Logan Kipatrick. Funds will be used to expand the company's engineering and product teams, and to advance their products, solidifying Guardrails AI as the leading platform for enterprises and developers to build safer, more reliable AI applications.
Guardrails AI provides tools to measure, monitor, and mitigate AI risks, empowering rapidly evolving AI development. The company has developed a unique approach to address the LLM reliability problem and mitigate risks of unintended consequences, by introducing a governance layer that validates and corrects AI application outputs.
"The breakthroughs in generative AI have created an inflection point for mass enterprise adoption. As part of a leading technology and financial group that is committed to becoming an AI-first organization, SCB 10X understands how transformative AI is in driving an enterprise's value. But to reap the impact of generative AI, we need to understand the limitations and risks inherent in the technology - such as the tendencies for large language models to hallucinate - and how to overcome them" said Mukaya (Tai) Panich, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Venture and Investment Officer of SCB 10X. "Guardrails AI is a game-changer, with their suite of validation tools, they have unlocked a critical roadblock for adoption, enabling companies to customize and enforce their safety and compliance standards in their AI workflows. We see Guardrails AI as the blueprint to safe and ethical AI innovation," added Mukaya (Tai) Panich.
Guardrails AI has also launched Guardrails Hub, an open-source platform that allows developers to build, share and reuse output validation techniques or "validators". Today, the Hub has a growing collection of over 50 pre-built validators crowdsourced by the developer community, including by SCB 10X R&D team who is currently developing Typhoon, a series of Thai open-source LLMs, which significantly outperform existing Thai LLMs in the market. SCB 10X contributed a validator to Guardrails Hub to ensure that an LLM output is produced in the intended language.
SCB 10X's contributions to the seed round and to Guardrails Hub underscore their conviction in Guardrails AI's mission to advancing trustworthy and safe AI innovation, and their shared belief in the open-source approach to meaningfully accelerate AI innovation.