Former AI Sustainability Center anch.AI Secures US$2.1 Million in Seed Funding to Launch Ethical AI Governance Platform

(Europe) Against the rising tide of regulation, anch.AI has released the first horizontally integrated ethical AI governance platform, a one-stop shop for businesses to accelerate responsible AI adoption across their organization. The B2B SaaS startup emerged from the AI Sustainability Center, a Swedish think tank, and has secured US$2.1M in seed funding to further develop and launch their pioneering risk assessment platform. The round was led by Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), with participation from Terrain Invest, Magnus Rausing, Kent Janér, and Fredrik Andersson.

Demand for AI governance tools has surged as organizations that operate in the European Union anticipate implementing sweeping GDPR-caliber changes due to proposed regulation on the development and use of artificial intelligence. Noncompliant companies could face fines up to 6% of their global turnover or 30 million euros. Yet, McKinsey research suggests that companies lack the capacity to address the full range of AI risks they face, and many are unclear on the extent of their risk exposure or the harm their AI could cause society and individuals, such as unintended discrimination, privacy intrusion, and social exclusion.

"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," said Anna Felländer, anch.AI's founder. "We developed the anch.AI platform for enterprises' visibility and orchestration of AI, to identify risks as well as their root causes, and remedy the areas of exposure."

Ensuring alignment with collective ethical values and compliance to existing and upcoming regulation, the anch.AI platform offers screening, assessment, mitigation, and reporting on one coherent platform. The assessment methodology stems from multidisciplinary research to detect and remedy ethical risks in companies' AI solutions.

"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."

anch.AI invites organizations to complete its free Ethical AI Health Check, which uncovers their organization's exposure to ethical and legal breaches. This initial screening is an important first step to developing AI humans can trust, regardless of their background.

The research team of the former AI Sustainability Center will continue to pursue world leading 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.