Why Maia Hightower’s Equality AI startup is shutting down

One day after President Donald Trump canceled the executive order of Biden urging federal agencies to formulate standards for responsible development of artificial intelligence, Maia Hightower, CEO of Equality Ai, published on Linkedin: “A sweet chapter -Amer: equality has closed its doors. “

Trump’s decree was the “last nail”, but EA equality struggled to find enough customers to cover its costs, Hightower told Stat in an interview. In the absence of essential federal initiatives to examine health care algorithms, he fell to those who use artificial intelligence in their hospitals to ensure that their tools help and do not injure patients. When Hightower was director of medical information and head of the population at Iowa University, she and her management realized that they did not have the tools to effectively assess the risk they took Using an AI model integrated into one of their platforms.

“It is in fact that the equality of AI was born, was to try to create tools for health care systems to be able to manage the risks of AI, starting with detection and the attenuation of biases, ”said Hightower. The Company, founded in 2021 with a modest $ 1.25 million in funding fund funding from Salt Lake City Investors Epic Ventures and Grix VC (Hightower was then director of medical information at the University of UTAH) , went to 12 employees at its peak, but was closed last week, after being unable to find funding to maintain it.