Pramaana Labs raises $27M seed round from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI

As enterprises struggle to turn AI pilot programs into functional parts of their business, reliability has taken center stage. A new startup is hoping to solve that problem by drawing on the tools of mathematical formalization, combining one of computer science’s most reliable systems with one of its most chaotic. On Wednesday, Pramaana Labs announced $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Accel, Boldcap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound. Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation — where errors can be costly and reliability is at a premium. Deploying AI in those systems will require stronger protections against hallucinations and errors than we currently have. But as Pramaana co-founder and CEO Ranjan Rajagopalan sees it, they’re also uniquely suited to formalization. “It’s like math in the sense that you have a lot of rules that you need to abide by,” Rajagopalan told TechCrunch, describing the rules of the tax code. “Once you have a codified version of it, the reasoning on top of it starts becoming deterministic.” Pramaana’s system still runs on a conventional LLM, giving it the flexibility to answer natural language questions and tackle complex problems that conventional computers can’t handle. But there’s a deterministic layer on top of that LLM ensuring the LLM’s work checks out. …