Startup Spotlight #24: Arize AI

Arize AI is the watcher, troubleshooter and the guardrail on deployed AI.

Aug 24, 2020

I got the chance to speak with Jason Lopatecki and Aparna Dhinakaran, co-founders of Arize AI, about what they working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.

Arize AI is a startup focused on machine learning (ML) Observability. They help companies monitor, troubleshoot, and explain their artificial intelligence (AI).

Startup Spotlight: Arize AI

Arize AI cofounders (from left to right): Jason Lopatecki and Aparna Dhinakaran.

Problem: AI systems are making trillions of decisions a day that affect people's lives. Companies deploying these systems today have limited observability and ability to troubleshoot problems.

Market: We are selling Machine Learning Infrastructure tools to businesses across all industries and all sizes that are using Machine Learning in production. The AI Infrastructure space is projected to be 50B by 2025.

Solution: We are building the first ML Observability platform to help make AI work by capturing information about the model inputs, decisions, and related events, and provide a real-time platform to monitor and troubleshoot issues. We offer explainability to help teams understand why their models are making certain decisions and how those affect customers.

Team: Aparna comes from Uber’s Machine Learning team and dropped out of her Ph.D. in AI at Cornell to start a YC Company. Jason is a second-time founder who’s first company IPO’d and was eventually bought by Adobe.

Recent Success:

Dhinakaran & Lopatecki: What we’re most proud of is the team we have built. We’ve built a great team of engineers who come from companies such as Google, FB, Slack, PagerDuty, Adobe, and Uber. We have combined top industry teams that have dealt with the large data analytics and world-class ML Infrastructure. Almost the entire engineering team is Berkeley CS alumni.

Recent Struggle:

Dhinakaran & Lopatecki: Our external company presence is pretty light. Our focus has been building products and supporting customers. We haven’t focused a lot on press or external company news. This is an area that’s important to improve as we leave our stealth mode.

Founder Advice:

Dhinakaran & Lopatecki: In the case of enterprise products, it’s important to pitch to a lot of customers before building any product. It’s important to hear the various problems customers face and glean what are common problems. YC always says “Talk to your customers” as their #1 advice and we couldn’t agree more. Stay customer-focused and solve customer problems.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Dhinakaran & Lopatecki: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Lisha Li, Founder of Rosebud AI: Rosebud AI generates images and videos on-demand with custom models not based on real people.
Jaclyn Ling, Founder of Hatchways: We de-risk the hiring process for companies while empowering hidden tech talent to build their portfolio and launch their careers in tech.
Guillaume Lachaud, Founder of Lazy Latern: Lazy Lantern provides autonomous analytics.
Brett Wilson, Founder of Tubemogul: TubeMogul (now part of Adobe) is the leading software company for brand advertising

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