AI app evaluation platform Maxim AI raises $3M in funding led by Elevation Capital

Maxim AI, an enterprise-grade evaluation and observability platform for AI applications, recently raised $3 million in a funding round led by Elevation Capital.

The round also saw participation from marquee angel investors, including founders of Postman, Chargebee, Groww, Razorpay, and Media.net.

Maxim AI will use the raised capital to expand its team and scale its operations. The startup plans to build more partnerships with enterprises, further establishing itself as a critical piece of infrastructure in the AI development landscape.

What does Maxim AI do?

With the explosion of large language models, the race to build and deploy AI applications has intensified. Traditional software development follows a deterministic paradigm with standardized best practices for predictably testing performance and systematically improving products, tightly integrated into the development lifecycle.

In contrast, generative AI products operate in a non-deterministic paradigm, leading to unpredictable variability in quality and performance. 

Moreover, challenges around hallucinations, inaccuracies, safety, and output structure lead to compromised user experiences and reputational risks for organisations.

The organisations are resorting to non-scalable techniques, high-paid manual effort, and tediously slow iteration cycles as they test and ship their AI into production.

Maxim AI said it addresses these challenges by providing a standardized, scalable evaluation infrastructure for AI development.

Who are the founders?

Founded in 2023 by Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo, Maxim AI is the brainchild of professionals with over a decade of experience in building AI and developer-focused tools.

Both founders have previously worked at top technology firms, including Google and Postman. They aim to use the best practices of traditional software development to streamline AI development workflows. 

The platform targets AI developers, including traditional AI/ML engineers and the emerging class of backend engineers leading AI development across organizations.

Maxim’s infrastructure sits between the foundational model and application layers of the AI stack, providing end-to-end AI evaluation across the development lifecycle.

How does Maxim AI improve AI development?

Maxim AI’s stack offers comprehensive tools for AI evaluation, from prompt engineering and pre-release testing to post-release quality checks and data management.

The platform helps teams ship products faster and supports critical last-mile evaluation, including human evaluation and custom datasets and models.

“Even though we are seeing tremendous value creation in the AI hardware and foundational model stack, for the benefits to be realized meaningfully up the value chain, we need the products built on top of the generative AI stack to be trustworthy and reliable. This makes evaluation a very critical piece of AI infrastructure,” the founders said in a joint statement.

The platform aims to standardize the generative AI testing space, unlike traditional software development.

As Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo explained, “With our users, we have become this very core piece of infrastructure that is powering high-quality AI development, streamlining team collaboration, and saving development teams hundreds of hours per month.”

Focused on expanding platform capabilities

So far, Maxim AI has attracted multiple global customers during its private beta phase, including leading enterprises at the forefront of the AI revolution.

The startup now aims to expand its platform capabilities, including proprietary domain-specific evaluations for quality and security and enhancing its data engine to accelerate the reliable and scalable deployment of AI products.

“Maxim AI is addressing a crucial need in the evolving AI landscape. Their focus on creating a standardised, scalable evaluation infrastructure addresses a deep pain point for AI developers. As the complexity and diversity of AI use cases continue to rise, Maxim's platform will play a critical role in ensuring trustworthy and reliable AI systems," said Akarsh Shrivastava, principal, Elevation Capital.