Illuminating AI for businesses to bolster trust and meet compliance
As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly proliferates across enterprises, rushed mediocre implementations create a series of operational risks: bias, opaque decision-making processes and unpredictable real-world behaviour.
Calvin Risk, a Swiss startup born out of ETH Zurich, has raised $4m in seed funding to help companies deploy AI safely and manage these risks through automated testing and quantitative risk assessment. The investment round was led by Join Capital and seed + speed Ventures, bringing total funding to more than $5m since the company’s inception in 2022.
AI models often function as “black boxes,” making it difficult to understand how decisions are made or whether underlying biases are influencing outcomes. For companies, this opacity can lead to unintended consequences that threaten both their operations and reputations – especially as generative AI systems like ChatGPT increasingly power customer interactions.
To make the stakes higher, the upcoming EU AI Act introduces strict requirements for AI systems, mandating that companies assess and document the risks of their AI models with severe penalties for non-compliance. Despite this, many organisations still rely on post-incident analysis or lack structured frameworks to address the safety of their AI.
Calvin Risk is bridging that gap with a platform that uses adaptive assessments and continuous monitoring to provide a real-time overview of a company’s entire AI portfolio, predicting potential risks (qualitatively and quantitatively) and their associated value-at-risk.
“With AI systems becoming central to operations, proper corporate governance must now include explicit AI risk management at the Board level,” commented Julian Riebartsch, CEO and Founder of Calvin Risk. “Through our governance and risk management platform, we provide businesses with deep insights into their AI inventory, enabling them to analyse technical, ethical, and regulatory risks qualitatively and quantitatively.”
Founded in 2022 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, one of Europe’s leading AI research institutions, Calvin Risk combines deep academic expertise with practical industry experience. The company’s product provides a modular framework for proactive AI governance with two core capabilities: governance digitisation for internal directives and risk evaluations, and automated AI testing between development and deployment.
Unlike traditional platforms focused solely on documentation or post-deployment fixes, Calvin Risk offers real-time insights through preventive, pre-deployment assessments, setting a new standard for responsible AI adoption. Its executive-friendly interface translates complex technical evaluations into clear, actionable insights, crucial for customer-facing AI, where transparency and reliability are paramount.
Learn more at calvin-risk.com.
