Integration platform AI Squared announced today the closing of a $6 million seed round led by NEA with participation from Ridgeline Partners. Launched in 2021, AI Squared helps companies adopt artificial intelligence by using a low-code platform to integrate it into existing applications in a timely and straightforward manner. Its founder, Benjamin Harvey, was inspired to start the company after a decade at the U.S. National Security Agency, where he saw how it and other organizations struggled to adopt artificial intelligence into existing applications. The struggle came from what's known as the last-mile challenge, which refers to the costly and time-consuming process of implementing an AI model within an application used on a day-to-day basis, like Netflix's program recommender system, he told TechCrunch. AI Squared helps solve the last-mile problem, assisting companies in adopting AI by using a low-code platform to integrate it into existing applications.

Have you heard the one about how our jobs are about to be snatched away by machines? Or how artificial intelligence will ultimately rise up against us? AI is a field full of tropes, many of which come from places of truth: AI is evolving at an incredible speed, and humans are teaching some AI to learn using the same basic model found in our own craniums. But for a more realistic take on the future of AI, look no further than the many software engineers and companies that have struggled to create an intelligent system that can identify cyber attacks. "We were trying to figure out what is the foundational problem--why do we have so many cyber attacks and data breaches that are going undetected?" says Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the author of a paper released today titled "Training A Big Data Machine To Defend."