TruEra, a startup that offers an AI quality management solution to optimize, explain and monitor machine learning models, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures. Existing investors Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Capital (which led its $12 million Series A round in late 2020), Harpoon Ventures, Conversion Capital, the Data Community Fund, as well as new investors Forgepoint Capital and the B Capital Group's Ascent Fund also participated in this round. In total, TruEra has now raised $42.3 million. "We believe that the next big challenge in AI is the quality challenge," TruEra CEO and co-founder Will Uppington said. "AI is at an inflection point: lots of opportunities but also a lot of challenges to make AI actually work in the enterprise. And we think that's the major issue that's preventing AI systems from getting into real-world use and actually delivering on KPIs."

It's hard to get stakeholders to buy into technology they don't understand. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), very few people actually get it, leaving an explainability gap for data scientists and businesses. Three years ago, the MIT Technology Review published an article about AI titled, "The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI." "No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem," Will Knight wrote. "Last year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey… . The car didn't follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. "Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat.