Pramaana, a startup focused on building trustworthy AI for high stakes industries, has raised a 27 million dollar seed round led by Khosla Ventures. The announcement was shared by founder Ranjan Rajagopalan, who explained the thinking behind the company and the problem it aims to solve.
According to Rajagopalan, certain domains such as tax, law, finance and healthcare form the backbone of how society functions, and these fields depend entirely on certainty. He pointed out that probabilistic AI systems, the kind most commonly used today, are not built to guarantee that level of certainty. While incorrect AI responses are often brushed off as hallucinations, Rajagopalan argued that in traditional software, the same issue would simply be called a bug. In sectors where accuracy is critical, a wrong answer is not a small glitch but a serious liability that could lead to major real world consequences.
Pramaana was created with the goal of offering a fully trustable AI experience, one where the system is provably correct rather than just statistically likely to be right. The company’s approach involves converting laws and regulations into code that machines can verify, allowing every output to come with a mathematical proof showing it is accurate. The broader mission, as described by the founder, is to make AI systems take full responsibility for the answers they produce.
The name Pramaana comes from Sanskrit and translates to means of valid knowledge. The company aims to live up to this name by structuring and formalizing existing knowledge so AI can rely on verified information rather than probability based guesses.
The seed round saw participation from several known investors. Khosla Ventures led the round, with Vinod Khosla personally backing the company. Other investors include Accel in India, BoldCap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest and Unbound. The round also included support from angel investors Pushmeet Kohli and Sriram Rajamani, who Rajagopalan credited for strengthening the company’s mission with their expertise.
Rajagopalan also acknowledged his close collaborators in building Pramaana, mentioning Krishnan Raghavan and Sanjay Ganapathy Subramaniam as key people behind the company’s progress.
With fresh funding in place, Pramaana is now focused on expanding its work in building AI systems that prioritize verified accuracy over probability, especially for industries where errors can carry serious consequences.
