Artificial intelligence startup Kyndi raises $20 million to advance industry’s first Explainable AI platform

Kyndi, an artificial intelligence startup building the first explainable AI platform, has secured$20 million in Series B funding to expand the company’s engineering and sales teams to meet growing customer demand in government, financial services and life sciences. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from UL Ventures, PivotNorth Capital, and existing investors.

Kyndi was founded in 2014 by Arun Majumdar, Paul Tarau, Ryan Welsh, and Shafe Ramsey. The Sillicon Valley-based startup is building the first Explainable AI platform for critical government and commercial institutions. Kyndi transforms business processes by offering auditable AI solutions.

“As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of how organizations operate and make decisions, there is a growing realization that they can no longer rely on ‘black box’ solutions that lack the rationale behind how recommendations were determined,” said Ryan Welsh, Founder and CEO of Kyndi. “Some of the leading organizations in government and the private sector are adopting Kyndi’s Explainable AI platform because we provide actionable intelligence that’s auditable and provides the reasoning behind every decision.”

Kyndi’s patented AI technology, including Natural Language Processing, enables organizations to analyze massive amounts of data, significantly faster. Equally important, Kyndi’s technology is auditable and explainable. That means that our AI systems can justify the reasoning behind their conclusions and results.

“Enterprises are turning to AI to take advantage of new opportunities and to solve pressing business problems, and we expect AI’s use in business will continue to grow as the technology matures,” said Nick Washburn, Senior Managing Director of Intel Capital. “Solutions like Kyndi’s, which remove some of the mystery of AI technology, will continue to gain importance, and we look forward to helping them accelerate AI adoption and address the need for explainability.” Investment Director Sunil M. Sanghavi led the investment for Intel Capital and will join Kyndi’s board of directors.

Unlike traditional “black box” AI solutions, the Kyndi platform scores the provenance and origin of each document it processes, while helping organizations quickly find difficult-to-locate information within collections of documents – without requiring large, labeled data sets to train the system. In addition, Kyndi’s Explainable AI software can be used in conjunction with robotic process automation (RPA) tools to analyze text and automate inefficient workflows.

“Kyndi was named an IDC Innovator because of their focus and innovation on ‘Explainable AI’ and the automatic creation of knowledge graphs to answer challenging questions from reams of unstructured data, and also because of the success their customers in government agencies and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical companies are having to quickly identify and locate hidden information,” said David Schubmehl, Research Director, AI Software Platforms, IDC.

“We are thrilled to have been able to work closely with these founders to build a market-defining company,” said Tim Connors, Founder and General Partner at PivotNorth Capital. “Kyndi’s team is now solving customer problems that until recently were unsolvable. It’s great to see good people working on important problems.”