Maria Karaivanova
Founder of WhyLabs
Seattle, Washington
Overview
Work Experience
Co-founder & COO
2019 - Current
WhyLabs enables teams to harness the power of AI with precision and control. From Fortune 100 companies to AI-first startups, teams have adopted WhyLabs’ tools to secure and monitor real-time predictive and generative AI applications. WhyLabs’ open-source tools and SaaS observability platform surface bad actors, bias, hallucinations, performance decay, data drift, and data quality issues. With WhyLabs, teams reduce manual operations by over 80% and cut down time-to-resolution of AI incidents by 20x. WhyLabs spun out from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and is backed by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, Madrona Venture Group, Defy Partners, and Bezos Expeditions.
WhyLabs AI Control Center provides security & observability for AI and GenAI applications
Raised $14,000,000.00 from Madrona, AI Fund, Defy.vc and Bezos Expeditions.
Kauffman Fellow - Class 24
2019
Co-investment VC firm supporting the mission of the Kauffman Fellows
Board Observer
2018 - 2020
Eclypsium is a firmware security company that protects organizations from the foundation of their computing infrastructure upward, controlling the risk and stopping threats inside firmware of laptops, servers, and networking infrastructure. Eclypsium was founded by two of the world's leading security researchers who pioneered the open source project CHIPSEC while at Intel.
Eclypsium offers a platform for supply chain security for IT infrastructure.
Raised $84,049,983.00 from J-Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Intel Capital, Alumni Ventures, KDDI Open Innovation Fund, Green D Ventures, Madrona, Global Brain Corporation, AV8 Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Board Member
2018 - 2020
Pulse Labs helps brands understand how real people interact with their voice apps through a rigorous process of live testing and data analysis. Using Pulse, voice app developers can quickly see how consumers want to interact with their app and get data on which prompts work and which don’t.
Board Observer
2017 - 2020
Pulumi makes it easy to build cloud applications that use a combination of containers, lambdas, and connected data services and infrastructure.
Pulumi is a cloud engineering company that offers a way to build, connect, and run modern cloud applications.
Raised $98,500,000.00 from New Enterprise Associates, Tola Capital, Strike Capital and Madrona.
Principal
2017 - 2020
Board Observer
2017 - 2020
Provider of IT operations and wire data analytics platform designed to transform the scale and complexity of modern IT into a powerful source of intelligence for business operations.
Board Observer
2017 - 2018
Heptio was co-founded by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the creators of Google's Kubernetes project. Heptio aims to advance and support the open Kubernetes ecosystem. The company was acquired by VMware (VMW) after two years.
Senior Executive & Head of Business Development
2012 - 2017
Cloudflare Worker's Launchpad is a funding program for for startups in partnership with leading venture capital investors.
Investor, Intel Capital
2010 - 2012
Investment areas: Enterprise Software, Cloud Security and Consumer Internet Select deals: Perspecsys (acquired by BlueCoat) Sourced this $8M Series A investment for Intel Capital in 2011 and worked with the company till my departure. Perspecsys provides cloud data protection software to solve cloud data residency, data privacy and data security of enterprises. Yummly (acquired by Whirlpool NYSE: WHR) Provider of a digital recipe platform designed to make it easier for foodies to find and share recipes. Part of the deal team leading to investing in $1.85M of seed round in 2010. Other: Intel / McAfee Strategic Engagement Team: joint sales, distribution and channel engagements
Program Manager, Emerging Markets
2009 - 2010
Accelerated Leadership Program
An ecosystem of software & hardware vendors, integrators and solution providers focused on adoption of NFV and SDN-based solutions.
Education
Master of Business Administration
2007 - 2009
BSBA
2001 - 2003