KPMG Ventures makes strategic investments in series of emerging technologies

Artificial Intelligence and Automation

In spring 2023, KPMG announced an investment in Cranium, a cutting edge software company that enables organizations to secure their artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Cranium was spun out from KPMG Studio – the firm’s internal incubator – and was developed in collaboration with AI Security experts in the firm’s Advisory practice based on real AI client challenges. As our clients’ reliance on AI increases, so too has the need for identifying, securing, and protecting the AI and GenAI models and associated training data. Cranium provides the software platform to inventory AI components and drive visibility and compliance across the enterprise and third parties.  Cranium was purpose built to help secure those AI and machine learning systems without interrupting how the company trains, tests, and deploys models. After providing initial seed funding, KPMG Ventures also most recently participated in Cranium's $25 million series A funding round.

KPMG recently made a minority equity investment in Auditoria.AI, a pioneer in automated, generative AI-powered intelligent applications for finance. Utilizing generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) and large language models (LLMs), Auditoria’s technology has the potential to reshape the corporate finance landscape. Auditoria is a Workday approved software partner, one of KPMG’s alliance partners, and processes ERP data to help organizations achieve greater cash position visibility by automating and orchestrating business processes.

KPMG most recently made an investment in Opkey, a software testing solution start-up that helps organizations transition from legacy systems to new technologies. Opkey’s software solutions improve the quality of the test automation process, and its platform also makes it faster and more cost-effective. Opkey does this by removing many of the repetitive, manual tasks that often take significant time and can result in errors. With many of the firm’s clients looking for efficient solutions to help them upgrade to new applications and technologies, Opkey is positioned to create value for our clients by enhancing quality and accelerate deployment at lower cost.

Applying ML/AI to sustainability reporting

KPMG also invested in distributed ledger technology and climate data and analytics company Context Labs to help companies that are increasingly interested in better measuring, quantifying, and reducing their environmental footprints. Enabled by machine learning and AI, the collaboration between Context Labs and KPMG U.S. is already demonstrating results with Williams, an energy company handling 30% of the natural gas in the United States. Williams is leveraging Context Labs’ Decarbonization-as-a-ServiceTM platform to track and measure emissions across the full energy value chain, executing the energy industry’s first end-to-end methane intensity certification, supported by KPMG.

Leveraging the cloud safely and securely

KPMG Ventures recently invested in ShardSecure, a cybersecurity startup that provides data security, privacy, and resiliency solutions - three capabilities that will become increasingly critical as organizations become dependent on proprietary data to train ML models and harness the potential of AI. ShardSecure has developed a patented technology that splits sensitive data into small, byte-sized files and distributes them across multiple cloud providers. This "data sharding" approach enables secure data storage in the cloud, prevents cloud admins or providers from accessing the data set, and mitigates ransomware attacks. ShardSecure allows companies to leverage the cloud's scalability and cost benefits for sensitive data while still maintaining complete security, privacy, resilience, and control. 

KPMG U.S. has also entered an alliance with ShardSecure, providing their unique data solutions to clients who understand that keeping their data safe and secure is paramount to maintaining trust and success in the market.