Kolena, a startup building tools to test, benchmark and validate the performance of AI models, today announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Lobby Capital with participation from SignalFire and Bloomberg Beta.The new cash brings Kolena’s total raised to $21 million, and will be put toward growing the company’s research team, partnering with regulatory bodies and expanding Kolena’s sales and marketing efforts, co-founder and CEO Mohamed Elgendy told TechCrunch in an email interview.“The use cases for AI are enormous, but AI lacks trust from both builders and the public,” Elgendy said. “This technology must be rolled out in a way that makes digital experiences better, not worse. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, but as an industry we can make sure we make the right wishes.”Elgendy launched Kolena in 2021 with Andrew Shi and Gordon Hart, with whom he’d worked for around six years at AI divisions within companies including Amazon, Palantir, Rakuten and Synapse. Through Kolena, the trio sought to build a “model quality framework” that delivered unit testing and end-to-end testing for models in a customizable, enterprise-friendly package.“First and foremost, we wanted to provide a new framework for model quality — not just a tool that simplifies current approaches,” Elgendy said. “Kolena makes it possible to continuously run scenario-level or unit tests. It also provides end-to-end testing of the entire AI and machine learning product, not just sub-components.”To this end, Kolena can provide insights to identify gaps in AI model test data coverage, Elgendy says

Kolena is teaming up with AI Accelerator Institute for their upcoming AI Accelerator Summit & Computer Vision Summit in San Jose on April 26-27, 2023.