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Why We Invested in AI Squared: Driving Enterprise AI Model Adoption and Implementation

5 min
4/17/2024

With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the enterprise race for impactful model implementation is quickly accelerating. Senior corporate executives recognize AI's potential to unlock greater efficiency, generate richer insights, and secure a competitive edge. However, a critical challenge persists: bridging the gap between model development and deployment. Today, enterprises are beginning to invest heavily in building high-performing AI models and teams, only to find them languishing in development or sandboxed environments—up to 90% of AI models at large enterprises fail to reach production, where they can deliver true value. Here at Ansa, we’ve built a thesis on AI infrastructure platforms that drive easier AI model deployment, observability, and re-training—all critical stages to enterprises realizing AI’s full potential.

Ansa is proud to announce its investment in AI Squared, with existing investors NEA and Ridgeline Partners. AI Squared’s platform is tailored to help enterprises find value from AI more quickly—by getting their internally built models into production faster and with fewer engineering resources. The product allows data science and machine learning (ML) teams to more rapidly deploy their internally built models into the existing applications that are used company-wide, a major gap in the existing enterprise infrastructure today. Model developers can use AI Squared’s platform to build pipelines that connect data sources and AI models to business applications, rendering relevant insights directly into their workflows. Using AI Squared, users can connect machine-learning models and other advanced analytics to business applications directly and in an app-agnostic way. AI Squared’s platform then creates feedback loops to improve model performance and UI design.  

As part of this new investment, Ansa General Partner Allan Jean-Baptiste and Roger W. Ferguson Jr., the former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Alphabet Board Member, will be joining AI Squared's Board of Directors. We’re excited to support the execution of AI Squared’s strategic vision and ambitious product roadmap, which will become a key portion of the AI infrastructure stack.

Shared Vision, Tangible Results:

AI Squared’s ability to streamline model deployment and drive faster value is core to our AI Ops investment theses. With the growth of AI as a new market, the enterprise infrastructure that will enable production-ready adoption is lacking—AI Squared solves this critical problem of ensuring that the increasing enterprise investment in AI results in tangible real-world results. The rate of model creation has increased exponentially, but it has relied on armies of implementation teams to translate them into results. By providing a low code and user-friendly platform, AI Squared aims to compress the deployment time from months to minutes, drastically reducing the complexity and cost of bringing AI insights to the forefront of decision-making processes. Solving such a critical breakdown delivers tremendous value to customers as it reduces deployment timelines, lowers the total cost of deployment, and allows for rapid model feedback and iteration.

Benjamin Harvey, Founder and CEO of AI Squared, echoes this sentiment. He highlights the current challenges faced by businesses: "Far too many companies aren't getting enough ROI from AI. Deploying a single model can take up to four months and requires the use of over ten tools. AI Squared's tools directly tackle this ‘last mile’ problem and make it much easier for businesses to deploy, use, and improve the use of AI within their teams."

This focus on developing the infrastructure to enable the massive technological advances of AI strongly aligns with Ansa’s investment philosophy. As Allan-Jean Baptiste, Co-founder and General Partner at Ansa Capital, explains, “While AI’s capabilities are rapidly growing, organizations’ ability to deploy them are not. With new state-of-the-art models being released practically every week and billions being invested, enterprises risk getting left behind. We see a massive market opportunity for AI Squared to solve significant corporate hurdles of AI implementation by simplifying integration into existing workflows and tools, while enabling faster time to value for AI investments.”

A Shared Vision for the Future of AI

Solving the deployment problem for enterprise AI is central to long-term adoption and we are excited by AI Squared’s ability to revolutionize the way enterprises derive tangible value from AI. Read more about AI Squared in Forbes. Visit squared.ai to discover more and explore career opportunities.

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