Reflecting on 2024 and looking to 2025, I'm both exhilarated by AI's rapid advancements-from multimodal models to enterprise adoption-and humbled by our shared responsibility to ensure it serves humanity's best interests. At Credo AI, we've not just witnessed this transformation; we've helped architect the governance foundations making it possible.

To our customers, partners, investors, and most importantly, the incredible Credo AI team—the "Credoers"—and their families: thank you. Your unwavering commitment to our mission of building a future where AI serves humanity responsibly has made 2024 a breakthrough year.

The past year marked a pivotal moment in AI's history. While headlines celebrated each new frontier model breakthrough, a quieter but equally significant revolution was taking place in enterprises worldwide: the emergence of AI governance as a strategic imperative. This shift mirrors the early days of cybersecurity when organizations realized that security wasn't a constraint but a catalyst for digital transformation. Today, AI governance is playing that same crucial role in enabling enterprises to build AI innovation responsibly.

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2024: A Breakthrough Year for AI Governance & Credo AI

Our growth at Credo AI reflects this broader market transformation. We achieved strong ~3x  growth in our software platform revenue and doubled our customer base while maintaining 100% platform retention.

Today, we proudly support many of the world’s leading enterprise customers, helping operationalize AI governance at scale. Collaborating with organizations like Microsoft, Mastercard, Databricks, McKinsey, and Booz Allen, we’ve driven measurable business impact through AI governance. These successes weren't achieved from behind desks. We traveled around the world to meet our customers and partners from London to Singapore (17 cities)—meeting face-to-face with customers and partners—to better understand their challenges and help them build governance frameworks that drive Return on investment in AI. Along the way, we inspired AI governance adoption from stages at events like International Association of Privacy Professionals(IAPP), the National Conference of State Legislatures, Fortune Brainstorm AI, the Financial Times Future of AI Summit, and the Fast Company Impact Council.Plus we were featured in over 150+ stories by top publications including CNBC, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and Business Insider and covered by leading analysts Gartner, Forrester,Omdia and others in over 30+ reports.

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In addition, our premiere Responsible AI Leadership Summit was a groundbreaking event, uniting over 200+ global AI visionaries, enterprise leaders, and policymakers shaping the future of AI. Trailblazers from Mastercard, Microsoft, Cisco, PepsiCo, Booz Allen, and Northrop Grumman joined forces with luminaries like Dr. Fei-Fei Li to ignite forward-thinking discussions on operationalizing AI governance and unlocking insights to achieve business outcomes. This landmark gathering set a new benchmark for responsible AI leadership, showcasing governance as the driving force behind innovation, trust, and sustainable progress. Videos from the summit are available here, and I’ve shared my reflections and key learnings from this transformative event in my blog.

These metrics tell a story beyond just our success – they signal the market's recognition that sustainable AI adoption requires robust AI governance.

Our $21M funding round (source: Bloomberg), bringing our total funding to $42M, demonstrated strong investor confidence in our vision.

More importantly, it provided the fuel to accelerate our mission of making responsible AI governance accessible to every organization deploying AI.

Finally, we are also continuing to bolster our leadership bench with key hires in sales, partnerships, engineering, and marketing to drive our next phase of growth. Furthermore, we are moving into 2025 with the tailwind of support from our customers, investors, stakeholders, and Credoers to achieve even more in the responsible AI governance space.

Product Momentum: Governance as a Competitive Advantage

2024 was a year of product breakthroughs that empowered organizations to innovate responsibly:

• Integrations Hub: Connecting Credo AI software to all the AI ops tools (ML and LLM ops) and Business Ops tools. Seamlessly embedding governance into existing AI/ML operations and extracting value from existing AI ops infrastructure.

• GenAI Vendor Registry: Enabling enterprises to adopt generative AI tools like OpenAI and Anthropic with transparency and control, Gen AI Vendor registry comes pre-populated with leading AI vendors and helps companies greenlight vendors for fast and scalable AI adoption.

• GRC for AI: Software platform updates to enable full governance, risk, and compliance management of generative AI and frontier AI capabilities.

• Credo AI Assist: AI-powered assistance to streamline AI governance workflows.

Beyond the Credo AI Software Platform, we launched our AI Governance Maturity Model to meet customers where they are in their journey. With a suite of AI Governance Advisory services, we are helping organizations scale and standardize their AI governance processes efficiently and effectively. These services ensure governance implementations are scalable and seamlessly integrated across the enterprise, empowering customers to deploy AI responsibly at scale.

• AI Governance Advisory: Guiding organizations through complex regulatory landscapes like the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001, and closing the AI governance literacy gap by training leaders and practitioners to operationalize Responsible AI

Strategic Partnerships: Scaling Impact Together

Our partnerships in 2024 positioned AI governance at the heart of enterprise AI infrastructure, equipping our customers with the tools they need to deploy AI responsibly:

• Microsoft Azure AI Integration and Partnership: A transformative partnership that integrates Credo AI’s governance platform with Azure’s AI ecosystem. Bloomberg Coverage| Microsoft Blog
• Databricks Partnership: Simplifying governance directly within enterprise data ecosystems. VentureBeat Coverage
• McKinsey Generative AI Alliance: Reinforcing our position as the trusted partner in AI governance for leading enterprises. Mckinsey Blog | Mckinsey Podcast

Ecosystem Leadership: Driving the Global Action

We didn’t just innovate; we shaped the future of AI governance:

• Partnered on the AILuminate Benchmark, setting new standards for evaluating generative AI safety and reliability. (Source: Mlcommons)
• Founding members of the AI Safety Institute to drive benchmarks and evaluations for the leading AI capabilities and models. (Source: Credo AI Blog)
• Expanded our global footprint, with impactful events and roadshows in London, San Francisco, New York and DC.

Global Credibility: Trusted by Industry and Leaders

In 2024, Credo AI was recognized as a leader in AI, with industry accolades including,

• #4 on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in AI, alongside Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA.(source: Fast Company)
• One of Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces for our outstanding culture and mission-driven team.
• CB Insights top AI startups to watch in 2024.

Our credibility is not just earned—it’s demonstrated through the transformative outcomes we deliver for customers and partners globally.

What to Watch in 2025: Insights and Opportunities

AI governance—encompassing reliability, alignment, safety, compliance, robustness, fairness, and privacy—is needed to break away from the pack for companies to win long-term, and that race starts now. 2025 is the year governance becomes the launchpad for AI innovation.  Enterprises, policymakers, and consumers know what is at stake. Much is yet to be written in this story of AI, but we are here for it, writing it for our customers and building the infrastructure of trust with and for them for AI.

Key AI Trends You Won’t Want to Miss in 2025

As we look ahead, several transformative trends will shape AI's evolution:

• Enterprise AI’s Moment of Truth: The enterprise focus shifts decisively from experimentation to industrialization. Organizations are moving beyond proofs-of-concept to production deployments, with increasing emphasis on practical applications that deliver measurable business value. The key challenge will be scaling AI while maintaining reliability and safety.

• Frontier Models & Specialized AI: The development of frontier AI models like o3 will accelerate, but they will be less useful to enterprises without governance frameworks ensuring their alignment and reliability. I believe the real breakthrough will be in specialized AI systems (aka Vertical AI) optimized for specific industry expertise. These models will combine the power of frontier AI with deep domain expertise, creating unprecedented value in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing.

• AI Agents & Automation: Autonomous agents will dominate conversations but prove unreliable without proper governance and alignment with governance standards. I believe the key to success will be clear oversight mechanisms and alignment with business objectives

• Multimodal AI: AI systems that seamlessly integrate text, speech, vision, and other modalities become mainstream. This creates new opportunities in customer service, product development, and operational efficiency while raising novel governance challenges around bias, privacy, and security.

• Open Source Innovation: Projects like DeepSeek will demonstrate how innovating within constraints can deliver impactful, cost-effective AI solutions.

• AI Supply Chain: Organizations recognize AI systems as critical infrastructure, leading to increased focus on model provenance, security, and supply chain integrity. This includes careful evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models.

AI Governance in 2025: The Best Kept Secret Becomes Your Strategic Differentiator

• Board-Level AI Competency: Beyond Oversight to Strategy: AI governance expertise will become as crucial for boards as financial acumen. But this goes beyond risk oversight – boards will need to understand AI's strategic implications, competitive dynamics, and ethical considerations. We'll see the emergence of dedicated AI Governance Committees, staffed with directors who combine technical understanding with strategic insight. This will mirror how corporate boards evolved to include dedicated technology committees in response to digital transformation.

• Rise of CAIOs: Just as cybersecurity breaches in the early 2000s catalyzed the rise of CISOs, the complexity of enterprise AI deployments will elevate the role of Chief AI Officers (CAIOs). Beyond just risk management, CAIOs will orchestrate AI strategy, governance, and value creation across the enterprise. This will spawn an entire governance ecosystem - from AI Risk Managers to AI Ethics Officers - creating career paths similar to how cybersecurity evolved into a specialized profession. The key difference? While CISOs primarily focus on protection, CAIOs will balance innovation with responsibility.

• Rise of Mission Critical AI Lifecycle Controls: The standardization of AI controls will mirror how SOC 2 transformed enterprise security but with a crucial difference: continuous adaptation. Traditional compliance frameworks were static; AI governance must be dynamic. Enterprises will implement "living" governance frameworks that evolve with AI capabilities. This includes automated AI use risk management, redteaming, monitoring, continuous testing, and real-time documentation of AI systems' behavior and impact. Think DevSecOps for AI but with intelligence built into the governance process itself powered by benchmarking and evaluations.

• Rise of Regulatory Precedents: 2025 will mark the year when AI governance becomes a strategic differentiator. As regulatory enforcement actions begin - similar to early GDPR penalties - enterprises that have invested in robust governance will gain significant competitive advantages. We'll see the first major fines for AI governance failures, but more importantly, we'll see market leaders using strong governance to accelerate AI adoption while others struggle with regulatory constraints.

• AI Agent Governance in The New Frontier: The proliferation of AI agents in enterprises will demand a fundamental rethinking of governance because, unlike traditional software, AI agents require continuous behavioral oversight, compliance boundaries, and performance monitoring. Smart enterprises will implement "agent oversight platforms" that combine technical controls (like containment systems) with company guidelines and business alignment metrics. This will be active stewardship of semi-autonomous systems. Organizations will need to establish clear supervision protocols and containment systems, similar to how network segmentation evolved to manage different security zones.

• Rise of Enterprise AI Governance Platforms: Perhaps most significantly, 2025 will mark a shift from AI governance posturing to operational reality. Our early adopters realized that spreadsheets and committees can't scale to manage hundreds of AI systems. Much like how organizations initially treated cloud security as a compliance exercise before developing mature operational frameworks, AI governance is evolving from theoretical frameworks to practical, continuous governance systems. Enterprise AI Governance platforms will emerge as the central nervous system for AI operations, automating compliance, managing risk, and ensuring alignment with business objectives. These platforms won't just monitor – they'll actively shape how AI systems behave and evolve within enterprise constraints.

2025: The Path Ahead

As we enter 2025, the AI industry stands at a transformative moment—one where governance is not a constraint but the foundation that fuels bold innovation. At Credo AI, we recognized early on that enterprises need more than cutting-edge technology; they need the infrastructure of trust to deploy AI responsibly and with confidence.

In 2024, our vision proved prescient. From pioneering partnerships to groundbreaking advancements in our software platform, we demonstrated that governance accelerates AI adoption while ensuring alignment with human values.

The opportunity ahead is massive. Every enterprise embracing AI is writing its chapter in this transformative revolution. Our mission is to ensure they write it boldly and responsibly—moving with speed while advancing trust.

To our extraordinary team of Credoers, visionary customers, and steadfast investors: thank you for believing in our mission. 2024 was a year of breakthroughs; 2025 will be the year governance becomes a strategic differentiator for enterprise success.

The future of AI is being written right now. Together, we are shaping a future that serves humanity’s highest aspirations and sets a standard for responsible innovation.