Blog

Image credits: Anch.ai

anch.AI, a Stockholm-based startup that offers a platform to accelerate responsible AI adoption within organisations, announced on Wednesday that it has secured $2.1M (approx €1.8M) funding in Seed funding led by Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV).

Investors, including Terrain Invest, Magnus Rausing, Kent Janér, and Fredrik Andersson, also participated in the round. The Swedish company plans to use the fund to further develop its horizontally integrated ethical AI governance platform.

🏆 Meet the 20 EIT Digital finalists!

Get to know the amazing finalists here

Get to know the amazing finalists here Show Less

anch.AI: What you need to know

anch.AI was founded by Anna Felländer in 2018 originally as a multidisciplinary research and consulting think tank. 

“AI solutions are often developed in a silo without integrated technical, legal, ethical and business-related oversight, which opens the door to costly and damaging risk for the business,” says Anna Felländer, anch.AI’s Founder. 

However, anch.AI pivoted last year to developing a risk assessment platform for businesses to ensure their use of AI is ethical and compliant with forthcoming regulations in the European Union. Noncompliant companies could face fines up to 6 per cent of their global turnover or €30M, mentions the press release. 

She adds, “We developed the anch.AI platform for enterprises’ visibility and orchestration of AI, identify risks as well as their root causes, and remedy the areas of exposure.”

Offers ethical checks

To ensure alignment with collective ethical values and compliance to existing and upcoming regulations, the Swedish company offers screening, assessment, mitigation, and reporting on one coherent platform. 

anch.AI says that the assessment methodology stems from multidisciplinary research to detect and remedy ethical risks in companies’ AI solutions.

The company anch.AI invites organisations to complete its free Ethical AI Health Check, which uncovers their organisation’s exposure to ethical and legal breaches. 

On the other hand, the research team of the former AI Sustainability Center will continue to pursue multidisciplinary research in the independent newly founded Research Institute for Sustainable AI, led by Ricardo Vinuesa, Ph.D. and AI researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

“We are thrilled to continue our research on Sustainable AI to ensure human values are kept at the core, while the anch.AI platform focuses on scaling their offering to businesses,” says Vinuesa, Director of the Research Institute for Sustainable AI.

Investor

Based out of California, Benhamou Global Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm. The VC focus on cloud technologies, virtual and software-defined networking, productivity-based applications, cybersecurity, mobility, and the Internet of Things (IoT). 

“anch.AI is pioneering an industry-first Ethical AI Governance Platform providing the best balance between speed, choice, and development of ethical AI,” said Anik Bose, general partner of BGV. “We believe AI risk represents a sleeping giant in our industry, and the anch.ai platform can make a major impact in addressing these ethical challenges as a single source of truth.”