Elaia and YCombinator back Phospho with €1.7M for GenAI application monitoring

Today product analytics and monitoring platforms developer Phospho announced a €1.7 million funding round led by Elaia and YCombinator.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deeply reshape and challenge how software companies develop products and user experiences. Phospho is building a monitoring platform for genAI applications that can be leveraged both by tech and product teams. 

This platform enables these teams to monitor user interactions at scale, detect issues, and extract insights to deliver a better conversational experience.  

AI models' stochastic (in simple terms, random) nature makes it extremely difficult to build a reliable product and track the metrics to refine the user experience. This is where Phospho comes in. 

Phospho offers three main features for product managers and developers building LLM apps:  

• Monitor: define and receive consolidated insights from all user interactions.  
• Detect: Phospho AI algorithms automatically pinpoint anomalies score and classify sessions in LLM apps. 
•  Improve: leverage Phospho's analytics to run tests and understand how people are using a product, enabling continuous improvement  

The company uses AI models to extract qualitative and quantitative insights from end-user interactions. A few lines of code are enough to help product managers and developers quickly sift through an enormous amount of unstructured data. 

Elaia Partners and YCombinator lead the €1.7M pre-seed round alongside deep domain practitioner Business Angels — whose involvement demonstrates the industry value of Phospho's solution:

• Bertrand Serlet (ex-Head of Software of Apple) 
• Julien Chaumond (CTO of Hugging Face)
• Abou Laraki (CEO of Monk AI)
• Stanislas Miquel (CPO of Monk AI)
• Sébastien de Lafond (ex-CEO Meilleurs Agents) 
• Mehdi Ghissassi (Director of Product at Google Deepmind)
• François Dorléans (McKinsey, co-founder at Stratumn) 
• Nicolas Schul (Product at Mistral AI) 
• Vincent Nallatamby (GenAI Product Manager at Google). 

The funding will enable Phospho to assemble a dedicated team focused on this mission. The Phospho team is joining the latest YCombinator batch of January 2024. 

Paul-Louis Venard explains: 

"As both Pierre-Louis Biojout and I hold Applied Mathematics and Computer Science degrees, we were eager to explore LLM use cases together but faced the same challenges as many others: experiencing the lack of tooling for building genAI products. 

With no means to monitor the performance of our LLM apps, we launched Phospho in April 2023. 

We are convinced that conversational interfaces are redefining the software industry, and in this context, Phospho's mission is clear: Make every word count. We are super excited to build the tools that will support the growth of a whole new industry."

Clement Vanden Driessche, Investment Director at Elaia adds: 

"We're happy to back Phospho at their pre-seed round. As generative AI transforms the tech landscape, Phospho's LLM app monitoring platform stands out with its robust observability features, ensuring LLM apps are enhanced in real-time. 

Trusted by LLM app builders and now joining YC 2024, we're excited to see the team take the company to the next level!" 

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