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San Francisco, Calif, December 10, 2024 – Gentrace, a developer platform for testing and monitoring generative AI applications, today announced an $8 million Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Headline and K9 Ventures. The investment, which brings Gentrace's total funding to $14 million, comes as the company launches its groundbreaking tool, Experiments – enabling the first truly collaborative LLM product testing environment that extends beyond engineering teams.
As many industry sectors race to integrate generative AI into their products, development teams face a critical challenge: ensuring AI applications are reliable, safe, and deliver consistent value. While the generative AI engineering market is projected to reach $38.7 billion by 2030 at a 34.2% CAGR, existing testing tools remain heavily siloed within engineering teams, creating bottlenecks and reducing collaboration.
"Generative AI represents a paradigm shift in software development, but the reality is there's way too much noise and not enough signal on how to test and build them easily or correctly," said Doug Safreno, co-founder and CEO of Gentrace. "We're not just creating another dev tool – we're reimagining how entire organizations can collaborate and build better LLM products.”
Beyond Traditional Testing
While most generative AI testing tools remain confined to code and engineering teams, Gentrace's platform uniquely enables product managers, subject matter experts, designers, and quality assurance teams to directly participate in AI evaluation through its comprehensive three-pillar approach.
The platform's end-to-end solution encompasses a purpose-built testing environment that models real-world applications, comprehensive analytics to assess AI model performance, and Gentrace’s newly launched Experiments.
Unlike traditional tools that require coding knowledge, Experiments enables cross-functional teams to:
- Test AI outputs directly within Gentrace's interface
- Preview test outcomes before deployment
- Anticipate errors and explore "what-if" scenarios
- Integrate seamlessly with existing workflows or tools like OpenAI, Pinecone and Rivet
Kojo Osei, Partner at Matrix Ventures, said:
"As generative AI reshapes the software landscape, Gentrace is addressing the crucial need for robust, systematic testing. The potential of AI is immense but only if we need to ensure outputs are reliable, safe, and actually useful. We believe Gentrace's innovative approach will set a new standard for AI quality assurance and are proud to support their mission to make AI applications trustworthy and effective."
Proven Results from Early Adopters
Dozens of early adopters including companies like Webflow, Quizlet, and a Fortune 100 retailer, report significant improvements in their ability to predict and prevent AI-related issues before they impact users. Quizlet increased testing by 40x and now iterates and receives testing results in less than a minute instead of hours.
Madeline Gilbert, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Quizlet, explains:
"Gentrace was the right product for us because it allowed us to implement our own custom evaluations, which was crucial for our unique use cases. The ability to easily visualize what was going wrong and dig into the results with different types of views has been invaluable. It's dramatically improved our ability to predict the impact of even small changes in our LLM implementations."
Bryant Chou, co-founder and chief architect at Webflow, said:
“Every LLM product needs evals. Gentrace makes evals a team sport at Webflow. With support for multimodal outputs and running experiments, Gentrace is an essential part of our AI engineering stack. Gentrace helps us bring product and engineering teams together for last-mile tuning so we can build AI features that delight our users.”
Technical Excellence Meets Market Understanding
Gentrace's founding team - Doug Safreno (CEO), Vivek Nair (CTO), and Daniel Liem (COO) - bring deep expertise in DevOps and AI. Their track record includes successfully launching and selling StacksWare, a VMware observability company, and scaling test infrastructure at Uber and Dropbox.
The company's impressive roster of angel investors and advisors includes industry leaders from Linear, Figma, Handshake, Webflow, Gem, Chronosphere, Ironclad, and Asana (NYSE: ASAN).
Strategic Growth Plans
The Series A funding will accelerate product development and expand Gentrace's engineering, product, and go-to-market functions to meet growing enterprise demand for AI development tools. The team also plans to develop its Experiments tool to continue democratizing generative AI testing workflows with future plans for threshold-based experimentation and auto-optimization.
About Gentrace
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Gentrace is redefining how organizations build and test generative AI applications. Learn more at www.gentrace.ai.
Supporting Quotes
Jett Fein, partner at Headline, said:
"We are thrilled to continue to back Gentrace as they support a fast-growing list of customers across industries like education, knowledge tools, ecommerce, health, banking, and more, including in the Fortune 100.”
Tim Wee, enterprise AI engineering consultant, said:
“Testing LLM products for Fortune 100 companies demands a robust system and coordination across many stakeholders. Gentrace gives us the best of both worlds: it integrates seamlessly with our complex enterprise environments and provides intuitive workflows that many teams can easily adopt."
Anna X. Wang, Head of AI at Multiverse, said:
“Gentrace allows our ML engineers to work cohesively with other engineering teams, product managers, and coaches. Combining AI and human evaluation really helps us move faster and be more confident in our deployment of AI to benefit our customers and learners."
Contact
For media inquiries, please contact: pr@gentrace.ai