Eppo secures additional funding to expand its AI experimentation
Eppo raises additional funding to expand its website, app, and AI experimentation business.
Many new models are being released by the AI sector all the time, and businesses that want to stay competitive are scrambling to use them for their needs. In fact, according to digital consultancy firm Searce, almost 10% of companies intend to invest a staggering $25 million in AI projects this year. However, even though AI is receiving a lot of funding, its return on investment is uncertain.
According to Gartner, half of all AI leaders are unsure about how to determine or prove the value of AI projects. Chetan Sharma, an ex-Airbnb data scientist, argues that, given the correct tools, calculating AI ROI is not a difficult task. Sharma is a co-founder of Eppo, a platform for experimentation where users can assess and modify AI models for particular applications.
A/B testing and experimental startups such as Split, Statsig, and Optimizely are competitors of Eppo in the market. Large cloud computing companies such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud also provide an increasing array of tools for model evaluation and fine-tuning.
However, Sharma claims that Eppo distinguishes itself from competitors with features like its "contextual bandit" system, which detects new variations of clients' websites, apps, or AI models automatically and actively investigates their effectiveness by sending more traffic or load to them.
Sharma claims that Eppo, which came out of stealth in 2022, currently counts "several hundred" commercial clients, including Twitch, SurveyMonkey, DraftKings, Coinbase, Descript, and Perplexity.
The head of data at Perplexity, Alexis Weill, told TechCrunch that Eppo has made it possible for Perplexity to "significantly scale" the number of trials it does at once. Investor satisfaction appears to be high. A $28 million Series B investment led by Innovation Endeavors, in which Icon Ventures, Amplify Partners, and Menlo Ventures participated, was concluded by Eppo this week.
According to Sharma, the additional funding will be used to expand Eppo's go-to-market initiatives, improve its analytics solutions, and strengthen the company's marketing and AI experimentation skills. This will value Eppo at $138 million post-money.
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