Root Signals, a startup based in Helsinki and Palo Alto specializing in generative AI (GenAI) measurement with LLM-as-a-judge techniques, has raised $2.8 million. Root Signals helps businesses accelerate GenAI adoption by providing them with enterprise-grade tooling to comprehensively measure, control and monitor LLM applications.

The round was led by Angular Ventures, with participation from Business Finland. Root Signals will use the funding to accelerate their platform and model development, and sales and marketing capabilities.

To safely ship GenAI-powered business applications to production, AI engineers have begun to use guardrails to block unintended behaviors. This approach controls risks but provides little capability for maximizing value. Instead, many are realizing they need to scrutinize the AI outputs with an extensive list of measurements with automations that mimic a human reviewer.

Ultimately, a task this complex can only be automated by other AI models, a technique often called LLM-as-a-judge. It allows one to quantify, for example, the degree of hallucinations, relevance of replies, or regulatory compliance. However, current AI frameworks do not adequately address the complexity, costs and unreliability involved.

A scalable, long-term approach to this is what the company calls EvalOps. By making it easy to build and automate these complex measurements, Root Signals makes production-grade GenAI applications quantifiable, reliable, auditable, and reusable.

“GenAI has no built-in quality control. You cannot treat it as traditional software, but rather you need to think of it as an unreliable freelancer. You have to be pedantic in instructing it, and then check its work in seven different ways – and then check again tomorrow. We make this scalable with metrics that are understandable and easy to maintain in production. Most other power tools in this sector are overly low-level and complex, or they provide more black boxes that kick the reliability can down the road,” says Dr. Ari Heljakka, Founder and CEO of Root Signals, with a PhD in GenAI.

To date, Root Signals has gathered $2.8 million in total funding.