AI is a paradigm shift. It offers incredible and exciting implications for human progress, from revolutionizing industries to enhancing daily life. However, we can't be naive about the risks. Concerns are rising about privacy, bias, ethical dilemmas, and the potential for AI to be used maliciously or irresponsibly.
We, Anna, Nikolaus & Sven, are young techno-optimists that want to contribute to a world where AI is leveraged to its full potential and benefits society and businesses. We believe that to scale AI mass adoption, proper governance is key, but it shouldn't be a burden of bureaucracy.
With trail - the Copilot for AI Governance - we have one goal: making AI governance smarter and faster so you can get back to business. We embed LLM-powered automation into our easy-to-use interface to offer the simplest way to prepare for regulation.
Our story and team
We met during our studies at TU Munich and the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), a program that successfully fosters startup innovation and brings together ambitious students from all backgrounds. Each of us has experienced the bureaucratic challenges and lack of transparency in AI from different perspectives: We dealt with compliance tickets as a software engineer in big tech, wrote extensive technical documentation of machine learning projects as data scientists, and translated between developers, compliance leads and project managers as consultants.
Adding to our own experiences, conversations with teams leveraging AI to build everything from traditional computer vision solutions to LLM-based applications, made clear that they didn’t know what to do with regulation like the EU AI Act. They already today spend up to 50% of their time on non-coding tasks like documentation, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and meetings. This isn’t the best use of their precious time - and together with the lack of quality, siloed information, and technological challenges, it becomes hard to build scalable solutions. It’s no surprise that many of the conversations turned into early users of trail.
Making AI governance efficient
Getting compliance done can be painful and everyone knows it. The incoming EU AI Act is technical and the manual solutions you are using today won’t be good enough. Compliance teams are pros at compliance, technical teams are pros at building - but each party lacks the understanding and time for the other’s work.
The good news is that trail brings these teams together and bridges this knowledge and communication gap. By integrating through a few lines of code, trail adapts to existing developer environments and governance workflows to become your copilot. Our clients, companies that develop or deploy AI solutions, use trail to automate governance workflows, technical documentation, and transparency to prepare for the EU AI Act and certification like ISO 42001 without overhead.
The EU AI Act can be overwhelming, so to get you started, we built a free tool on our website to help you understand what you need to do to comply. Check it out here.
We've raised our pre-seed round
The market is quickly growing, demand is rising, and there is a lot to do! This is why we raised our €1.45 million pre-seed round to help us accelerate our product development, expand our amazing team, and strengthen trail's position as the go-to AI governance solution in Europe. We are thrilled to have the partners of CapitalT, Eva and Janneke, lead the round and trust in our vision and team.
We are proud to have raised money from a diverse set of people who truly understand the space. Like Sarah from Common Magic, who shaped responsible AI early on in Silicon Valley, and Anke, Paul, and Mies from NP-Hard Ventures, who have deep expertise in developer tooling. Mohamed and Adam from Mozilla Ventures bring their DNA of backing trustworthy AI, and our angels have built and exited their compliance or AI companies.
Try our trail yourself
Are you developing or implementing AI solutions in your company and uncertain about how to navigate regulatory challenges? Want to prepare for the EU AI Act or certifications like ISO 42001 without overhead?
Book your demo here.
Join our team
Does our mission resonate with you? We’re hiring. Right now, we’re looking for our next software engineer (full-time/intern) or business intern to join our amazing team in Munich.
If you are interested, please reach out to hello@trail-ml.com.
Let’s blaze a trail together!
