Sierra Ventures: Our Early-Stage Investment in Expert Intelligence
SIERRA Ventures Led Expert Intelligence's $5.8M Seed Round to Automate Expert Judgment in Regulated Labs
At Sierra Ventures, we champion visionary teams tackling the most intricate challenges that others have yet to solve. Regulated laboratories are one of those places. The data is complex and mostly numeric, decisions carry real-world consequences, and mistakes are not tolerated. Despite massive progress in AI elsewhere, this environment has remained stubbornly manual.
That is why we led the $5.8M seed round in Expert Intelligence.
Expert Intelligence (EI) is building AI systems that replicate expert judgment directly at the instrument level. Instead of relying on language models, reports, or large labeled datasets, the company developed a new architecture called the Limited Sample Model (LSM). LSM is designed for environments where data is scarce, precision is mandatory, and auditability is non-negotiable.
The founder, Lalin Theverapperuma, is uniquely suited to this problem. He has spent more than two decades building machine learning systems where signal quality and correctness matter more than scale alone. At Apple, he spearheaded machine learning and digital signal processing for iPhones and AirPods, working hands-on with raw sensor data deployed to hundreds of millions of devices. At Meta, he orchestrated hybrid deep learning systems for AR and VR, combining classical signal processing with modern ML to operate reliably in constrained, real-world environments. Earlier in his career, he held senior technical roles at Intel and Bosch. This background sparked a clear insight: most modern AI approaches fail when applied to numeric, high-precision decision-making workflows.
That insight is what breathed life into Expert Intelligence.
In pharmaceutical labs, food safety testing, CDMOs, and CROs, scientists still manually review analytical instrument data. The work is slow, expensive, and error-prone. Foundation models do not solve this problem. The data is not text, the margin for error is effectively zero, and every decision must withstand regulatory scrutiny.
LSM addresses this problem directly. It learns from as few as 30 to 50 expert-reviewed examples and reproduces expert judgment with full traceability. There are no hallucinations and no opaque black-box outputs. The system operates on raw instrument signals, mirroring how senior analysts actually work.
Since early commercial deployments in 2025, Expert Intelligence has already secured customers across pharmaceutical manufacturing, analytical testing, and food and beverage safety. EI CoPilot is live in Fortune 100 labs and used across HPLC, GC-MS, LC-MS, and imaging workflows. Customers report dramatically faster review cycles and seamless integration with existing LIMS and QA systems.
We believe Expert Intelligence is building foundational infrastructure for regulated laboratory workflows, a critical decision layer that sits between instruments and higher-level enterprise systems. If executed well, this becomes durable workflow software with meaningful switching costs and long-term expansion potential.
We are excited to partner with Lalin and the Expert Intelligence team as they scale precision AI across industries where correctness, transparency, and trust are paramount.