Worldwide business spending on AI is expected to hit $50 billion this year and $110 billion annually by 2024, according to technology research firm IDC.
Yet despite its massive growth and potential, AI presents three major areas of ethical concern for society according to Michael Sandel, who teaches a course in the moral, social, and political implications of new technologies at Harvard: privacy and surveillance, bias and discrimination, and perhaps the deepest, most difficult philosophical question of the era, the role of human judgment.
Founded in 2020, Credo AI is an AI platform designed to address these issues. The Palo Alto, California based company positions itself as empowering organizations to create AI with the highest ethical standard by allowing business and technical stakeholders to measure, manage and monitor AI introduced risks, to ensure ethical, auditable and compliant AI development at scale.
Credo AI Founder and CEO Navrina Singh
The company was founded with $5.5 million in seed funding led by Decibel Partners, along with Village Global and AI Fund, by founder and CEO Navrina Singh and her co-founder and CTO Eli Chen. The pair were inspired by the mission to help organizations build AI aligned with human values.
A long-time veteran of Microsoft and Qualcomm, Singh says of her reasons for starting Credo AI, “I had a lot of conviction that building the next frontier within this AI revolution is going to be a set of capabilities that enables enterprises to build AI in a good way.”
She spent years at Microsoft defining what “good” meant for AI. Along the way, she created a non-profit called Marketplace For Ethical and Responsible AI Tools (MERAT.AI) and started to work on side projects with some of the biggest companies to understand if her thinking around the issues of good AI was a priority or just a “check-the-box” exercise for them.
“At that point, I recognized that an organization like Microsoft, even though they had the right intentions, won't be able to move fast. They will be an important part of this ecosystem to do that education around responsible AI, but not important enough to create independent tools for AI governance. And so right before the pandemic, I had this internal drive to create and bring change in that space and decided to take a bet on myself and then leave the corporate world and start Credo AI,” says Singh.
That conviction was further validated by the fact that AI pioneer Andrew Ng and his AI Fund were willing to invest in Singh even without Credo AI having built the core technology right out of the gate.
It’s still early days, but the company is gaining traction for its AI governance SaaS platform. “We are already generating revenue. As an early state start-up, I'm a huge believer in commending our lighthouse customers and our design partners who are those AI first ethics forward companies,” says Singh. Credo AI’s customers are primarily among the top 2000 global companies. According to Singh, a Fortune 50 financial services firm is one of their biggest customers as is one of the largest Cloud providers, along with defense contractors. All large organizations who are deploying and delivering machine learning at scale.
“Even more interesting is how they're using it because we are a very multi stakeholder platform. So, as you can imagine, when you step back and think about the typical chasm between the technical and oversight functions within our customer base, what we are really doing is infusing change through our SaaS platform where it's enabling collaboration between the data scientists and these oversight functions,” says Singh.
Singh sees her upbringing and the choices she had made as fundamental to her journey to creating Credo AI. From an early age her moral compass and values were shaped through her early life growing up in humble circumstances in India.
Her dad served in the Indian army for 40 years. “One of the biggest lessons I learned from him was really around people first mentality. Whatever we create should always be in service of the people in the communities that we are part of. And that has been, I would say, a very solid foundation,” says Singh.
Her mom was a high school teacher turned fashion designer who taught her from an early age how to be very curious and to be a learn-it-all person rather than a know-it-all person. “I think when you grow up in that environment where you are encouraged to think about solving problems for community and people, but also encouraged to be super curious and continuously learning rather than showing up as an expert, I would say that really set me up for success, and in the engineering and the science journey that I decided to go on,” says Singh.
She graduated from Pune College of Engineering and came to the US for her masters in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After graduating she had the good fortune of working as an engineer at Qualcomm and counts her opportunity to meet its visionary founder Irwin Jacobs who inspired her to think big about solving problems through technology and where she began her work in machine learning. While at Qualcomm she also earned her executive MBA at USC Marshall School for Business in Los Angeles.
Her work on robotics and machine learning was exciting, but concerning. “I was intrigued, but also worried about safety of humans in working in partnership with robots. How does a system, if it mis-performs, what do we do? What's our responsibility? How can we shut it down? Are there ways we should be thinking about human safety? And obviously, as you can imagine that safety descriptions in the software are even more complicated. So I started to get very interested in safety of AI systems and also in how this very frontier technology, which had existed for 50 years, but how machine learning is going to power the next wave of technology revolution,” says Singh.
One of her bosses from Qualcomm was recruited by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and brought Singh along to help them start thinking about commercialization of artificial intelligence technology. “Microsoft had this amazing set of technologies which was called cognitive services, which was a bunch of AI services from language models to speech systems, to vision systems. And I was in charge of creating applications around those so that they could be a great way to enable Cloud adoption. I struggled with that narrative within Microsoft because it's a big organization and it was slow to move on some of these ideas. But my faith in AI governance was bolstered when I was appointed as a young global leader with the World Economic Forum, and this was during my time at Microsoft,” says Singh. She left Microsoft in 2019 and founded Credo AI in 2020.
As for the future? “We're well on track to make multimillion dollars by the end of this year. And obviously that is very important for a start-up. But what is more important is this is going to be a long journey. In the next 14 to 15 months, we are going to see more regulations show up. While I don't focus on just the regulation, I think that's going to open the floodgates for many of the companies that are behind, and they'll be like, ‘oh my God, I need a Credo AI like solution’,” concludes Singh.
