Coval: Simulation & evaluation for your AI agents
I always like to keep a close eye on Y-Combinator graduate companies. It's a quick way of seeing both what's hot, what's new and where 'the Valley' is, in terms of mindset.
For instance, I recently wrote about the fabulously named Vet Dodo. How can you forget that name? They're offering a fantastic service to replace Veterinary Surgery phone systems with Conversational AI.
Which brings me to Coval:
Their Y-Combinator overview starts with this paragraph:
Teams are racing to market with AI agents, but slow manual testing processes are holding them back. Engineers currently spend hours manually evaluating and playing whack-a-mole just to discover that fixing one issue introduces another.
So far, so good. I recognise that reality right now. This is one of the reasons so many companies (financial services, in particular) have dozens if not hundreds of people involved in their Conversational AI programmes.
So what does Coval do?
At Coval, we build automated simulation and evaluation for AI agents inspired by the autonomous vehicle industry to boost test coverage, speed up development, and validate consistent performance.
Brooke Hopkins is the founder of Coval and she knows a thing or two about the domain:
Before starting Coval, I led the evaluation job infrastructure team at Waymo. I coded the first versions of our dataset storage and other foundational simulation systems, and my team built all of the dev tools for launching and running evals Through my conversations with hundreds of engineering teams at startups and enterprises, I've seen that AI agents—models that operate independently and handle complex tasks—are facing similar challenges to those in self-driving.
I know a lot of Conversational AI News readers are business people, not necessarily focused on the minutiae – but someone in their team is. So if you think you might like some help with your continuous integration and development methods for your chat and voice assistants, reach out to Coval.
You can find out more about the Coval offering here: https://www.coval.dev/
And connect with Brooke here:
