Pienso has secured $10M in Series A funding

Pienso, a company specializing in enabling non-technical users to construct, deploy, and manage customized AI models across domains, recently announced its successful Series A funding round, led by Latimer Ventures, with participation from Gideon Capital, SRI, returning investors Uncork and Good Growth Capital, and founder and CEO of GraphCore, Nigel Toon. Pienso will use the raised funds to grow its team and continue its development of AI solutions for non-technical users.

Co-founders Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar came up with the idea behind Pienso while both were working at the MIT Media Lab building algorithms for online bullying detection. Upon realizing that their algorithms were ineffective because Jones and Dinakar lacked the knowledge of the appropriate slang, they decided to enlist a group of teenagers to help them. However, this represented another issue, as their helpers lacked the technical knowledge to input the data directly. As a result, Jones and Dinakar figured that the gap between users and AI model training needed to be addressed and that a platform like Pienso was an ideal solution.

Pienso is an LLM provider-agnostic no-code platform that enables non-technical users to quickly and accurately annotate large volumes of data that can be used to train algorithms. Pienso can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud and was built to prioritize data sovereignty, so it does not require sharing private data with any third parties. The startup and its platform already provide Sky, the UK's largest broadcaster, and the US Government with a broad range of solutions. The closing of its successful $10 million Series funding round will empower Pienso to carry on its mission to bridge the gap between AI training and the needs of non-technical users in a wide range of industries and domains.