Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence startup Kyndi Inc. announced today that it has closed a $20 million funding round.

In a blog post, the company said it will use the Series B round to expand its team, in particular the sales and engineering teams. The round was led by Intel Capital, with UL Ventures and PivotNorth Capital, previous investors also participating

Founded in 2014, Kyndi claims to be the first company of its kind building what it calls “explainable AI.”

“As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of how organizations operate and make decisions, there is a growing realization that they can no longer rely on ‘black box’ solutions that lack the rationale behind how recommendations were determined,” Chief Executive Ryan Welsh wrote. “Some of the leading organizations in government and the private sector are adopting Kyndi’s explainable AI platform because we provide actionable intelligence that’s auditable and provides the reasoning behind every decision.”

Kyndi said that its product reads and summarizes large amounts text data for personnel, giving staff more time to focus on other tasks. The AI can apparently read more than a thousand documents in just seven hours.

As an example, Kyndi said, its AI helped one of its pharmaceutical customers by reading through all the company’s free-form text. The software spotted 13 new and unknown problems that traditional business intelligence tools did not spot because they were in text fields.

“Explainable AI means that our software’s reasoning is apparent to the user, and that the system can explain its rationale,” the company explained. “This visibility allows you to have confidence in the system’s outputs, be aware of any uncertainties, anticipate how the software will work in the future and know how to improve the system.”

Kyndi’s customers so far have been mostly government, pharmaceutical and financial services organizations. Since its Series A funding two years ago, it has quadrupled in staff size, revenue and number of customers.

Photo: Kyndi