Maxim AI, an enterprise-grade evaluation and observability platform for AI applications, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from prominent angel investors, including founders of renowned companies such as Postman, Chargebee, Groww, Razorpay, and Media.net.
The company plans to utilize the funds to expand its team and scale its operations, fostering partnerships with leading enterprises building AI products. Founded in 2023 by Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo, former Google and Postman employees with over a decade of combined experience in building AI and developer-focused tools, Maxim AI aims to bring the best practices of traditional software development to streamline AI development workflows.
With the recent explosion of large language models, the race to build and deploy AI applications has intensified. However, unlike traditional software development, which follows a deterministic paradigm with standardized testing practices, generative AI products operate in a non-deterministic paradigm, leading to unpredictable variability in quality and performance. Challenges around hallucinations, inaccuracies, safety, and output structure often result in compromised user experiences and reputational risks for organizations.
Maxim AI’s infrastructure, positioned between the foundational model and application layers of the AI stack, caters to AI developers, including traditional AI/ML engineers and the emerging class of backend engineers leading AI development across organizations. The Maxim stack provides end-to-end AI evaluation across the development lifecycle, encompassing prompt engineering, pre-release and post-release testing for quality and functionality, data management, and fine-tuning.
“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,” said Vaibhavi Gangwar and Akshay Deo in a joint statement. “However, today there is no standardization in the generative AI testing space unlike traditional software development. That’s where Maxim comes in: 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.”
Akarsh Shrivastava, Principal at Elevation Capital, commented on the investment, saying, “Maxim AI is addressing a crucial need in the evolving AI landscape. Their focus on creating a standardized, 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.”
In its private beta phase, Maxim AI has already attracted multiple global customers at the forefront of the AI revolution. Looking ahead, the company is committed to expanding its platform capabilities, including proprietary domain-specific evaluations for quality and security, as well as its data engine to accelerate the reliable and scalable deployment of AI products.
