Humanitas Technologies, the impact data infrastructure startup that is building a universal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) API or “Grammarly for DEI”, recently announced they’ve acquired $1.5 million in seed funding.
As noted in an update shared with CI, investors include Francoise Brougher, Jeff Walker, Mark Tercek, and founders and executives from FiscalNote, Mammoth Biosciences, Cymantix, Google AI, Expedia, Meta.
The funds will “enable Humanitas to expand engineering capacities to continue building upon its mission of counteracting an increasingly sexist and racist internet.”
Phil Chow, CEO and co-founder of Humanitas, stated:
“By unlocking frontline socioeconomic data, we’ve created a mutually beneficial tool that’s accelerating nonprofits’ digital transformation while providing developer-friendly integrations for companies to tap into this unique and previously unavailable view of society. People of color will make up a majority of the American working class by 2032. Algorithms powering enterprises today are not designed to account for this seismic demographic shift,”
Data aggregated and de-identified by Humanitas “enables companies to utilize nuanced insight gathered from millions of public and partnered nonprofit sources via an API layer.”
With marketing use cases being the first implementations of these APIs, companies adopting Humanitas to implement into numerous marketing efforts “will have more inclusive algorithms at their disposal, which will lead to better user engagement while reducing demographic bias.”
Aravindh Ravisankar, CTO and co-founder of Humanitas, said:
“Current enterprise algorithms lack a quantifiable and personalized DEI perspective that end-users expect. Building a sustainable data pipeline from frontline organizations is the first step towards bringing a ground-truth perspective to these algorithms.”
Jeff Walker, Chairman of New Profit, remarked:
“The big picture is that Humanitas is building the data infrastructure to mainstream stakeholder capitalism. I believe Humanitas’ unique approach will be the quantum leap to embed DEI directly into the core products and services across companies of all sizes.”
Chow added:
“We are committed to an operating model that can build a robust, scalable, and sustainable business that’s net-positive for everyone,”
As covered, Humanitas Technologies is on a mission “to counteract an increasingly racist and sexist internet.”
The company is building the “Grammarly for DEI” offering API-layer solutions “for enterprises to become more inclusive across their end-consumer touchpoints.”
Humanitas was co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Phil Chow and Ara Ravisankar and “is backed by founders and executives from FiscalNote, Google, Expedia, and more.”
The company is based in Palo Alto.