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XAIN, the AI startup that specializes in privacy-oriented Federated Machine Learning (FedML), announced today it has secured funding in cryptocurrency from IOTA Co-Founder Dominik Schiener, continuing the trend of venture capital funding through cryptocurrency. Known for partnering with Porsche to become the first to put blockchain technology into a car, XAIN’s distributed approach to machine learning offers greater privacy, security, and efficiency in the way data is trained.
Building and training artificial intelligence requires, for privacy and security reasons, keeping different parties’ data in separate buckets, or anonymizing data from those buckets before it can be trained and stored together in one AI model. The former limits the effectiveness of AI applications, while the latter adds considerable cost. XAIN’s FedML addresses both issues by training data into separate AI models that are then safely and securely aggregated. The learnings from these data buckets are communicated and aggregated, but only the aggregations are stored.
Through XAIN’s FedML, datasets and AI models can be kept on local premises without putting a burden on compliance. Different parties can collaborate to gain insights from the union of their datasets without ever revealing any single participant’s data to anyone else. As such, there is no need to anonymize or store local data in a central source. This reduces cost and simplifies the data training process without compromising the privacy of local datasets, an attractive feat for businesses.
“We are thrilled to have received Dominik’s support,” said Leif-Nissen Lundbaek, CEO and Co-Founder of XAIN. “With IOTA, Dominik has created a remarkable open-source source ecosystem. We see the open-source approach as relevant to our technology and hope to benefit from Dominik’s expertise. Having him on board helps propel us forward in our quest to provide an open and privacy-preserving AI technology. XAIN’s FedML solution will ensure the truly scalable and effective adoption of AI.”
XAIN’s FedML technology can be used both internally by companies, and externally in the creation of products. The first application running its training models on XAIN’s FedML technology is ANDY. This solution for automated invoice processing consolidates machine learning knowledge from each customer for whom the app is running, all while keeping the customer’s data private in its respective corporate environment. ANDY is designed for larger enterprises, where the application really utilizes its potential — especially when the trained models are consolidated among various departments within a company, or even between corporate subsidiaries.
“XAIN’s FedML technology has proven to be a huge breakthrough in the advancement of AI,” said Schiener. “With this investment, I see a great opportunity to help push IOTA further towards product-readiness and bring greater privacy, security, and efficiency to both the DLT and AI sectors. The AI ecosystem is rapidly growing, and I see XAIN combined with IOTA uniquely positioned to create an open and permissionless ecosystem which leverages the strength of both platforms.”
“We invested in XAIN at a very early stage and what this company has developed over the last two years is hugely impressive and most advanced AI technology,” said Dr. Christian Nagel, Founding Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and Member of the XAIN Supervisory Board. “The strategic partnership with Dominik Schiener proves this once again.”