After a Silicon Valley stint, AI Squared’s founder wants to boost AI integration for private and public entities

With just over a year of company history, DC’s AI Squared is already making noise in the local artificial intelligence world.

The 22-person company, founded by CEO Benjamin Harvey in 2021, helps other companies add artificial intelligence into their tech with a low-code platform. In June of last year, the company raised $6 million dollars (landing it on our RealLIST Startups list in January).

With his company’s technology, Harvey told Technical.ly that he wants to make AI integration a smoother process for both private companies and government partners.

“AI Squared goes in and helps you create integration in a way that it’s actionable, it’s relevant, it’s timely, it’s contextualized and it really, ultimately, supports the decision-making that’s necessary for that end user and that application,” Harvey said.

But before this startup, Harvey’s data work was focused on making a change. Harvey, whose credentials include serving as head of data science for the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Edward Snowden leaks, spent a decade at the NSA before founding AI Squared.

There, he noticed a problem: there were hundreds of data scientists working on the next big thing in machine learning and AI. But a very large portion of those AI-based analytics and statistical modeling never actually made it into a mission production application used by military partners. And for him, that hit a little close to home, as he had two brothers deployed to Afghanistan and Qatar who couldn’t access these insights.

So, he opted to leave national security and build a prototype of something that could help. Yet, he felt like he wasn’t quite ready to take the AI startup world by storm.

“I knew that if I wanted to do that, I needed to go to Silicon Valley,” Harvey said.

In California, he became an early employee at enterprise software company Databricks as a solutions architect and data scientist. He ended up pitching his idea to the CTO, who connected him to investors that would eventually supply the $6 million (according to Harvey, they also valued the company at $30 million post-round).

Today, the company is on a mission to build dual-purpose technology that can work in both the federal government and industry. So far, Harvey said, its customers include Vanguard, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, the NSA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

AI Squared’s tech works in implicit behaviors. Using Netflix as an example, Harvey described it as the app tracking and giving recommendations not on what you watch, but specifically on what you like and rate well. But in order to do that, he said, there’s a lot of complexity, and requires technologists with a very specific set of skills. AI Squared seeks to simplify this, allowing companies to customize that AI integration with a low-code or no-code framework and user-friendly experience for receiving the recommendations.

“We remove that complexity of all the tools and technology under the hood that you need to integrate that machine learning algorithm or AI capability,” Harvey said. “And we provide a framework where you only need one person, that individual does not have to be technical, and they can use our technology, our framework, to be able to describe the path of integration into the application.”

In the new year, Harvey plans on gearing up for growth. He hopes to expand the number of users and is looking to hire tech and sales people to prepare the company to scale. He said there are no firm plans to raise this year, but he will be accepting term sheets for potential investors — and future partners.

“We’re working really hard to continue to identify champions inside of these organizations that want to solve that AI integration problem where they’re having difficulties integrating AI, machine learning into currently existing applications,” Harvey said.