Hirundo Beats 1,100 AI startups to First Prize in RAISE Summit Startup Competition

Judged by a panel from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google and Sequoia, Hirundo's pioneering technology that empowers enterprises to make AI models "forget" problematic data and behaviour took first place in the prestigious AI startup contest

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Hirundo, specialists in machine unlearning, has beaten more than 1,100 of their peers in the RAISE Summit Start-Up Competition, as it was recognised for its game changing machine unlearning technology. The Israeli startup, which recently raised an $8M seed funding round, pipped 10 of its peers who pitched, and three who made it to the main stage, as it was crowned the winner by a panel of expert judges including Julien Bek of Sequoia Capital, Serge Lemonde of NVIDIA and Julien Codorniou of 20VC in the Top 3 round. Sarah Benhamou of BGV, Laura Modiano from OpenAI, Cyrille Saint Olive from Google and Gabriel Hubert of Dust also oversaw the participants in the top 10 round.

The company is developing industry-first solutions to enable "machine unlearning" — the ability to selectively remove unwanted data, knowledge, or behaviors from trained AI models without retraining them from scratch and without degrading model performance. On stage, it was demonstrated how Hirundo's technology tackles AI hallucinations and biases across a wide range of models and how it could remove unwanted information.

Hirundo's solution enables AI models to forget specific data, concepts, or behaviors. Operating like a form of AI model "neurosurgery," pinpointing where in a model's billions of parameters biased or toxic knowledge is encoded, and precisely removing it, Hirundo's tech ensures data is fully deleted, model accuracy is assured, and the process is scalable and repeatable.

The RAISE Summit took place this year at Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and hosted more than 5,000 participants from more than 1,500 companies. RAISE is positioned as the leading AI conference in Europe, and "RAISE the Stakes", its startup competition track is considered the largest AI startup competition in the world. Among the speakers at the conference, aside from Hirundo, were also Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Nikesh Arora, Chairman & CEO of Palo Alto Networks, and Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog.

CEO of Hirundo, Ben Luria, called the prize a "huge vote of confidence that strengthens our message to the world: that wider AI adoption will be empowered by helping AI forget bad behaviors and data. We're proud to pave the way as the first machine unlearning solution on the market."

Luria praised, "the promising startups that made it alongside us to the Top 3 - Alexandre Pasquiou from Neuralk AI and Vincent Molina from pyannoteAI who are building some of the most exciting tech I've seen this year." He thanked the RAISE and the Chain of Events teams who pulled off an amazing AI conference with great speakers. "It's exciting to see how much both Hirundo and RAISE have grown since last year."

Hirundo ended in pole position, ahead of 1,100 applicants, 10 of which made it to the pitching stage, and three who got to the final on-stage shoot-off at the closing day of the conference, on July 9.

About Hirundo

Founded in 2023 by serial entrepreneur and Rhodes Scholar, Ben Luria alongside award-winning researcher Michael Leybovich and Professor Oded Shmueli, former Dean of Computer Science at Israel's Technion, Hirundo is the first startup in the world to offer an unlearning solution, pioneering the concept of "making AI forget." By leveraging patent-pending technologies, Hirundo, which raised an $8M seed funding round, led by Maverick Ventures Israel, is dedicated to making AI more safe, trustworthy and accurate. Its solutions empower enterprises to deploy AI with confidence, ensuring responsible AI adoption while providing mission-critical accuracy.

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SOURCE Hirundo