Pienso offers a no-code AI suite that enables non-technical teams — researchers, marketers and customer support — to annotate data, train and deploy models without writing code. The platform guides users through labeling for pre-tuned open-source or custom models and can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. It integrates with enterprise systems via APIs but can also operate without third-party services to keep data within a secure environment. Pricing is a yearly license based on the number of AI models a customer deploys, allowing customers to experiment before making large investments. Customers cited in the article include Sky (using Pienso to analyze customer service calls) and an unnamed U.S. government agency that tested it for monitoring illegal weapons tracking. Pienso was founded in 2016 by Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, who developed the core tools during research at MIT’s Media Lab. Pienso is a Brooklyn-based MIT spin-off that helps non-technical domain experts interact with and improve machine learning models. Its core product, the Intelligent Development Environment, is an end-to-end platform that includes Lens, a feature that lets non-technical users directly interact with ML algorithms. The company aims to solve the human-in-the-loop problem by embedding domain expertise into model training so nuance and context are preserved. CEO Birago Jones frames Pienso as a way to capture expert judgment from researchers, analysts and other knowledge workers who lack ML expertise. Pienso announced a $2.1 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures with participation from SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund. It plans to use the funding to grow its small team and start expanding its customer base.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Mar 2024