Everyone wants the power of AI. Few want to hand their most sensitive data to a foreign cloud to get it. A Basque startup thinks it has the fix.
Sherpa.ai has raised $18m to build AI that never sees your raw data, tech.eu reported. The Spanish company sells to banks, hospitals and governments, the customers most nervous about where their data goes. Its pitch rides a fast-rising theme: sovereign AI.
Training without sharing
At its heart sits federated learning. Instead of pooling data in one place to train a model, the model travels to the data. Each hospital or bank trains it locally, then shares only the lessons, not the records. Sherpa.ai says its research can cut the data sent between sites by up to 99 per cent.
That matters most in regulated corners where privacy rules block ordinary AI projects. The goal, said founder and chief executive Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, is to let firms “harness the full potential of AI without giving up control, privacy and sovereignty over their data.”
