AI monitoring company NannyML raises € 1M

Leuven. NannyML announces the successful completion of its € 1.06M pre-seed investment round. The young AI monitoring company wants to bridge the gap between AI and business and prevent AI from making wrong decisions through careful monitoring.

NannyML's goal is to bridge the gap between AI and business. As more and more processes get augmented or automated with AI, business stakeholders are starting to lose touch with decisions that are being taken within their departments. NannyML helps decision-makers by monitoring the decisions that AI takes, understanding how those decisions change over time and how those changes impact their business.

In their pre-seed funding round, the tech start-up raised 1.06 million. The round was led by Volta Ventures, followed by Lunar Ventures and with the collaboration of Stijn Christiaens (CTO and co-founder of Collibra), Jonathan Cornelissen (co-founder of Datacamp), Lieven Danneels (CEO of Televic), Willy Baptist, and Anthony Brenninkmeijer. Frank Maene of Volta Ventures joins the board of directors as an observer along with Dr. Elad Verbin from Lunar Ventures.

The realization that the world is changing, data is changing, and AI starts making bad decisions, made it extremely clear that there is a need for a company that monitors AI. NannyML’s mission is to monitor AI, ensuring that it is always adding value. For the development of their business they could count on the support of Belgium's largest startup accelerator, Start it @KBC.

Hakim Elakhrass, CEO Nanny ML: “We are excited to have Volta Ventures and Lunar Ventures as investors. Together with our experienced team of angels, we are ready to bring about real change to AI in production. This investment will help us to further develop our software and rapidly grow NannyML into being Europe's leading player in AI monitoring. With more and more AI being used to make business-critical decisions, it is more important than ever to know what AI is deployed and what decisions it is making.”

Frank Maene, Volta Ventures: “The challenges of monitoring and governing AI are fundamental and increasingly relevant. Since first meeting the NannyML team, we have been impressed with their vision on this problem and how to tackle it. That’s why we are very excited to invest and work together with the founders and co-investors.”

Dr. Elad Verbin, Lunar Ventures: “The fantastic team at NannyML is building a smoke alarm for algorithmic trouble, saving companies from the damage of wayward algorithms before any damage has been done. NannyML detects “model drift”, raising the alarm when an algorithm no longer fits the world and needs to be updated. We are incredibly proud to support Hakim, Wiljan and Wojciech in their mission to make our world’s algorithmic infrastructure safer for humanity.”

The NannyML founding team has known each other for over five years. They met when Hakim (American) and Wojciech (Polish) came to study at the KU Leuven. At a hackathon in Brussels, they met the 3rd co-founder Wiljan (Belgian). Before NannyML, they built a machine learning consultancy. While working together as consultants they started to realize that AI being deployed into the real world faced some serious challenges.

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About NannyML
NannyML is a software for monitoring AI, ensuring that it continues to add business value. We track changes to model inputs, outputs, and performance in production. We are building a bridge between AI and business.

About Volta Ventures
Volta Ventures invests in young, promising internet and software companies in the Benelux. Teams in Gent and Amsterdam provide guidance and assistance to grow from startup to scale-up.

About Lunar Ventures
Lunar Ventures is a Berlin-based VC fund, investing in pre-seed and seed DeepTech Software startups across Europe. Lunar was founded by scientists and engineers, to support scientists and engineers who are building computer science-based moonshots.