Calvin Risk welcomes new investors in second pre-seed round

The funds will be added to the previously raised round to expand the research and development team and validate the risk quantification approach for the insurance, banking, pharmaceutical and high-tech industries. The team is also well equipped to extend the risk quantification to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4.

Each new business angel joining Calvin Risk's new pre-seed round is an expert in their respective field. Diana Zur Löwen, for instance, is a marketing, social media, and product placement specialist and will bring this expertise to Calvin as a shareholder.

In her LinkedIn post explaining why she invested in Calvin, Zur Löwen stated, "AI is more than an entertaining trend. Besides the many opportunities it offers, it also poses numerous risks. Especially when companies use algorithms in their processes, it is important to control them. For example, it must be ensured that no minorities (gender bias) are disadvantaged. Calvin Risk’s mission is to enable the risk, management and control of AI algorithms to ensure trustworthy, compliant and responsible use.”

Founded by Julian Riebartsch and Syang Zhou, Calvin Risk provides customisable risk management, governance and compliance software for AI algorithms that assesses and manages technical (performance, robustness and security), ethical (fairness, explainability and transparency) and regulatory (accountability, compliance & control) risks to enable secure, transparent, and trustworthy AI. In addition, the tool performs economic impact and profitability analyses on the applications of AI systems.

With their solution, Calvin gives large companies in the banking and insurance sectors the means to build a standardised decision-making process for algorithm adoption tied to understandable quality criteria. In addition, this approach allows technical and business stakeholders to connect through a common decision-making framework. The approach is closely related to traditional risk management and model validation but with new modern features such as including different stakeholders in the AI lifecycle.

MVP finalised, pilot projects underway
With the MVP of its customisable risk assessment and management software for AI algorithms finalised, the team has worked with an international insurance group and on other banking-related projects to validate the solution further. “We have started to conduct extensive business presentations and platform demos in the banking and insurance, high-tech, and the pharma sector to win additional customers”, said Julian Riebartsch to Startupticker. The collaboration partners stem mainly from Europe (including Switzerland and the UK) and the US.

Moving forwards, Calvin plans to finetune and validate its risk management tool and methodology on several types of AI algorithms and work on understanding and extending risk assessments to LLMs such as chatbots. “This is still an open research field that has become increasingly important since the emergence of GPT, Bard LLaMA, etc. Many commercial organisations want to use these platforms but are scared of their risks and shortcomings, such as network hallucinations or data leakage,” explains Julian.

(RAN)