Pramaana Labs raises $27M seed round from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI

Pramaana Labs announced a $27 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI systems. Participants include Accel, Boldcap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound, with the company targeting high-stakes domains such as law, drug discovery, and tax preparation where errors carry heavy costs. CEO Ranjan Rajagopalan describes formalization as essential because formal rules and deterministic reasoning can reduce hallucinations and mistakes when deployed alongside a standard language model. The approach pairs an LLM with a deterministic verification layer, enabling natural-language interaction while ensuring outputs can be checked against codified rules.

Pramaana plans to build a LEAN-style formal verification system for each use case, overseen by domain experts, and cites France’s CATALA project as precedent for formalizing complex systems. For tax, the company is working with former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel; cybersecurity and drug discovery efforts involve professors from IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, and UC Berkeley. Rajagopalan asserts that 'The world’s hardest problems are not unsolvable, they are unformalized,' a philosophy underpinning their effort to codify governing rules so AI can reason deterministically in sensitive fields.