SANTA CLARA — Expert Intelligence, a startup building AI systems that automate expert decision-making in regulated laboratory environments, has raised a $5.8 million seed round led by Sierra Ventures with participation from TSVC and Acorn Pacific Ventures.
Founded by Lalin Theverapperuma, Ph.D., a veteran AI and machine learning engineer with more than 20 years of experience at Apple, Meta, Intel, and Bosch, Expert Intelligence’s platform operates directly on raw instrument data, rather than relying on downstream reports or large labeled datasets.
At the core of the platform is the Limited Sample Model (LSM), a new approach designed to learn how expert analysts make decisions using a small number of samples. Unlike large language models or traditional ML systems that require massive datasets, LSM is built for regulated environments where data is scarce, highly contextual, and tightly controlled.
“Expert Intelligence is building foundational infrastructure for autonomous decision-making in some of the most demanding environments in the world,” said Ben Yu, Managing Partner at Sierra Ventures. “Their ability to learn from limited data and operate at the instrument level unlocks a category of automation that simply wasn’t possible before in regulated labs.”
Since commercial deployments in early 2025, Expert Intelligence has secured customers across analytical testing workflows in pharmaceuticals, drug manufacturing, and food and beverage safety, supporting use cases such as automated result review, anomaly detection, and expert-level decision consistency. The company plans to expand into additional lab-driven and industrial domains over time.
“Labs have invested heavily in instrumentation, but critical decisions still bottleneck on human review,” said Lalin Theverapperuma, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Expert Intelligence. “We built LSM so regulated labs can scale expertise with accuracy, transparency, and audit readiness from day one. Our models learn directly from how experts interpret raw signals, allowing labs to increase throughput without introducing new compliance risk.”
The new funding will be used to accelerate customer expansion in pharma, deepen integrations across laboratory systems, and build go-to-market and customer success capabilities.
