After 10yrs at U.S. National Security Agency, man’s AI company raises $6m to help companies adopt artificial intelligence

AI Squared is an integration platform that helps companies adopt artificial intelligence by using a low-code platform to integrate it into existing applications. Essentially, AI Squared makes it easy to integrate machine learning into some of the most important web-based applications.

The company was founded by Benjamin Harvey, who was inspired to start the company after spending 10 years at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), TechCrunch reports. At the NSA, Harvey saw how the agency and other institutions struggled to adopt artificial intelligence into existing applications.

“The struggle came from what’s known as the last-mile challenge, which refers to the costly and time-consuming process of implementing an AI model within an application used on a day-to-day basis, like Netflix’s program recommender system,” he told TechCrunch. 

AI Squared helps to solve this difficulty by helping companies to adopt AI by using a low-code platform to integrate it into existing applications.

Prior to the seed round, Harvey noted that he pitched to a handful of investors, revealing that the fundraising lasted three months. He recently disclosed that the company has closed a $6 million seed round led by global venture capital firm NEA with participation from Ridgeline Partners.

The company plans to use the money raised to help drive technology innovation, employment hiring, new product development and expansion and employment hiring.

Greg Papadopoulos, Venture Partner, NEA, said: “AI Squared enables businesses to unleash the magic of AI with a low-code, easy-to-integrate platform aimed to make companies smarter, more effective, and more innovative. We’re excited to partner with Ben and his team to improve business outcomes by making AI usable and accessible to business and data teams alike.”

AI Squared hopes to reach unicorn status and joined the only six unicorns led by Blacks. Meanwhile, AI Squared has reached a cooperative development and research agreement with the “NSA, a contract with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and is partners with Databricks, Vanguard, Tableau, Salesforce, Nvidia and Microsoft,” according to TechCrunch.

“As Black founders who are learning this complex environment for the first time, we need to build networks of technical executive communities that will act as our lifeline,” Harvey said. “That will ultimately open doors for [us as] the next generation of Black founders.”

Harvey, who grew up in Jacksonville, is a three-time HBCU graduate. He obtained a degree in computer science at the Mississippi Valley State University before obtaining a master’s and doctor of science degree at Bowie State University.

He subsequently worked at Harvard and MIT’s joint Health Sciences and Technology program, where he looked at machine learning and algorithms to cancer genomics datasets, according to TechCrunch.