Zeni, an AI-powered finance concierge for startups, today announced it has raised $13.5 million in a series A round led by Saama Capital. The company says this will bolster the launch of its new product, Zeni, an intelligent bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO service available to startups across the U.S. Studies show the vast majority of day-to-day accounting tasks can be automated with software. That may be why over 50% of respondents in a survey conducted by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants said they anticipate the development of automated and intelligent systems will have a significant impact on accounting businesses over the next 30 years. Zeni, which was founded by twin brothers Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde in 2019, combines AI with a team of finance experts to perform bookkeeping while managing finance functions -- including taxes, bill pay and invoicing, financial projections, budgeting, payroll administration, and more -- on behalf of customers. The Shinde brothers started Zeni after selling their last startup, Mezi, to American Express in 2018 for $125 million and the Indian music streaming service they cofounded, Dhingana, to Rdio in 2014.

In this work we provide a review of basic ideas and novel developments about Conformal Prediction -- an innovative distribution-free, non-parametric forecasting method, based on minimal assumptions -- that is able to yield in a very straightforward way predictions sets that are valid in a statistical sense also in in the finite sample case. The in-depth discussion provided in the paper covers the theoretical underpinnings of Conformal Prediction, and then proceeds to list the more advanced developments and adaptations of the original idea.