CTGT is a San Francisco-based that enables enterprises to scale their AI efforts with a new approach to customising, training and deploying AI models that are up to 500x faster. In a recent development, the company raised $7.2 million in an oversubscribed seed round. Notably, this is the first investment secured by the company.
Strong backing from investors
Gradient, Google’s early-stage AI fund, led the round with participation from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Deepwater and notable angels, including François Chollet (Google, creator of Keras), Michael Seibel (Y Combinator, co-founder Twitch), Paul Graham (Y Combinator), Peter Wang (co-founder Anaconda), Wes McKinney (creator of Pandas), Mike Knoop (co-founder Zapier), Kulveer Tagger (Zeus Living), Andrew Miklas (co-founder PagerDuty) and Taner Halicioglu (first full-time Facebook employee).
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate product development and sales and marketing.
Revolutionises training and deploying AI models
CTGT was founded in 2023 by Cyril Gorlla, a 23-year old alongside former classmate, Trevor Tuttle, at the University of California San Diego. The two dropped out and were admitted to Y Combinator.
CTGT enhances AI safety, reliability, and efficiency for enterprises. Its platform mitigates AI hallucinations, biases, and compliance risks through real-time monitoring and automated safeguards. By improving model interpretability, CTGT transforms AI from a “black box” into a transparent system, helping businesses maintain control. The company also accelerates AI training, reducing computational costs and deployment time.
The platform actively monitors and audits a client’s custom models, allowing it to better spot and eliminate unwanted behaviour. Enterprises can also refine and retrain models on the fly without the need to take models offline for updates.
Trusted by Fortune 500 firms, CTGT ensures AI models operate securely and effectively in critical sectors like healthcare and finance. With a focus on AI governance, safety, and performance, CTGT enables organisations to deploy AI confidently while minimising risks and maximising impact. One of its first customers, the professional accounting firm Ebrada Financial Group, uses the platform to improve the reliability of its frontline customer service chatbots.
Our thoughts on this investment
The deal highlights investor confidence in startups building model-training tools, as giants like Google, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’s xAI compete to develop the most advanced foundation model.
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