Pramaana Labs raises $27M from Khosla Ventures to make AI answers mathematically verifiable

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

As enterprises struggle to turn AI pilot programs into functional parts of their business, reliability has taken center stage. A new startup is hoping to solve that problem by drawing on the tools of mathematical formalization, combining one of computer science's most reliable systems with one of its most chaotic. On Wednesday, Pramaana Labs announced $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Accel, Boldcap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound. Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation -- where errors can be costly and reliability is at a premium. Deploying AI in those systems will require stronger protections against hallucinations and errors than we currently have. But as Pramaana co-founder and CEO Ranjan Rajagopalan sees it, they're also uniquely suited to formalization. "It's like math in the sense that you have a lot of rules that you need to abide by," Rajagopalan told TechCrunch, describing the rules of the tax code. "Once you have a codified version of it, the reasoning on top of it starts becoming deterministic." Pramaana's system still runs on a conventional LLM, giving it the flexibility to answer natural language questions and tackle complex problems that conventional computers can't handle. But there's a deterministic layer on top of that LLM ensuring the LLM's work checks out. This combination of an LLM engine with deterministic verification is a popular setup; Pramaana's unique approach is to use the tools of formal verification -- drawing on the open-source LEAN programming language used to verify mathematical proofs. There's real precedent for much of this work; Rajagopalan points to France's CATALA project, which formalizes much of the country's tax and benefit system into executable code. For each use case, Pramaana will build its own LEAN-style formal verification system, overseen by domain experts. For tax law, the company is working with former IRS commissioner Danny Werfel, while professors from IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, and UC Berkeley oversee the cybersecurity and drug discovery system. "The world's hardest problems are not unsolvable. They are unformalized," says Rajagopalan. "Every domain where being wrong can cost someone their health, money, or freedom has rules." Now, those rules just need to be codified.

AI startup Pramaana Labs raises $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures

Pramaana Labs, an AI startup, has secured $27 million in seed funding. The company develops technology to ensure AI answers are mathematically verifiable. The startup will use the new funding to train Pramaana's formalisation and proof-checking models, expand its AI research staff, and venture into regulated areas such as tax, medical diagnosis, cybersecurity and financial compliance. Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Pramaana Labs has raised $27 million in a seed funding round led by Khosla Ventures. Accel, BoldCap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest and Unbound are among other investors that participated. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Pramaana was founded by IIT Madras alumni Ranjan Rajagopalan, Krishnan Raghavan and Sanjay Ganapathy. It builds technology to make AI answers mathematically verifiable. As per the company, its system converts complex knowledge, such as the US tax code, clinical protocols, and financial regulations, into a formal language that a machine can understand. When a user asks a question, the system turns it into a formal statement, runs it through a proof engine, and either returns a checkable proof that the answer is correct or explains exactly which rule it breaks and why. The startup claims that its system may refuse to answer a question, but will not guess, adding that it has never produced a confidently wrong verified answer. The startup will use the new funding to train Pramaana's formalisation and proof-checking models, expand its AI research staff, and venture into regulated areas such as tax, medical diagnosis, cybersecurity and financial compliance. "AI has an accountability gap," cofounder and CEO Rajagopalan said in a statement. "Every domain where being wrong can cost someone their health, money, or freedom has rules. Pramaana encodes those rules into a form a machine can reason over with certainty." Pramaana has roped in professors from IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and UC Berkeley for its research lab, and collaborates with Stanford's Centaur Lab. Its tax-formalisation work is advised by Danny Werfel, a former IRS Commissioner, along with researchers from Yale Law School and Stanford. Early backers of the startup include Google DeepMind vice president Pushmeet Kohli, and senior Microsoft executive Sriram Rajamani. Rajagopalan previously led Google Maps Moderation, Raghavan worked on Glean's AI assistant and Ganapathy was a former staff research engineer at Google DeepMind. He also contributed to Gemini's tool-use systems.