In January 2026, the pioneer in model monitoring and trustworthy AI Fiddler AI announced the closing of a $32 million Series C funding round. The investment was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing backers including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Haystack, and Lux Capital.
The company is led by Founder and CEO Krishna Gade, the former engineering lead for Facebook’s News Feed ranking, alongside Co-Founder Amit Paka. Fiddler is building an enterprise-grade Model Performance Management (MPM) platform that enables organizations to monitor, explain, and analyze AI models in production to ensure fairness and prevent hallucination.
As enterprises transition from R&D to large-scale deployment, “Model Drift” and lack of transparency have become critical operational risks. Fiddler addresses this by providing an observability layer that tracks model behavior in real-time. This focus on systemic reliability mirrors the rise of autonomous IT observability, where AI-driven monitoring replaces manual triage with high-fidelity logic.
The new capital will be used to scale its “Fiddler Auditor” tool and expand its presence in highly regulated sectors like finance and healthcare. By enforcing rigorous governance guardrails, Fiddler provides a level of structural integrity similar to AI-native logic enforcement, ensuring that the next generation of enterprise agents remains compliant and reliable.
Market Signal
- The “Black Box” Resolution Alpha: Fiddler’s $32M round validates that “Trust” is the primary currency of the 2026 AI economy. By turning opaque algorithms into transparent business assets, Fiddler allows boards to greenlight high-stakes AI applications that were previously blocked by compliance concerns.
- Founder-Infrastructure Fit: Krishna Gade’s experience managing the world’s most complex recommendation engine at Facebook provides Fiddler with a rare “Scale-First” pedigree. This ability to handle high-frequency, billion-node data streams is why Insight Partners led the round.
- Governance as a Competitive Edge: In 2026, AI governance is no longer just a defensive legal requirement; it is a growth lever. Fiddler transforms risk management from a bottleneck into a speed advantage, allowing enterprises to deploy and iterate on agents faster than their unmonitored competitors.
Key Details
- Company: Fiddler AI
- Funding: $32M Series C
- Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA
- Lead Investor: Insight Partners
- CEO: Krishna Gade
- Use Case: AI observability, model monitoring, explainable AI (XAI), and bias detection
