Together, the Nivea-backed startup paid AI $102.5 million.
12 months ago Benito Santiago
The open-source cloud AI startup is the latest developer to draw a big payday for the company as more investors pour their money into artificial intelligence. 102.5 million dollars With Series A investments – including from tech giant NVD.
“I think one of the things that has pleased investors is our focus on research,” a spokesman said. Decrypt. We've been building a real lead research team doing deep research on how to improve the training and visualization of these large generative models. This is confirmed by some of the publications we have opened. [and] It's in our recently launched Invention Engine, which is about three times faster than anything else out there.
US venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins led the $102.5 million investment with participation from NVadi and Emergence Capital. Kleiner Perkins Associates spoke together. Bucky Moore They will join the joint board on the basis of their investment.
“[NVIDIA] It is a partner and a leading company in this space,” said Co-Founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. Bloomberg. “They are the platform for AI today.”
Others joining the Series A investment include NEA, Prosperity 7, Greycroft, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, Definition Capital and Long Journey Ventures. In May, the company jointly announced that it has increased 20 million dollars In the seed fund, according to the report Venture Bit.
“We're very concerned about cost performance, so our services for our creative servers are six times cheaper than Open AI's, and our training services are four times cheaper than AWS,” says Prakash.
The investment will go towards improving the cloud platform for AI applications, investing in research and development, contributing to open-source AI and enhancing the infrastructure, a joint spokesperson said.
The spokesperson outlined the company's privacy-focused approach, saying developers have greater control over how data is shared and used on the platform and the ability to decide on data storage options.
“By default, we do not use any data from our customers or their users for model training,” the spokesperson said. “And so [customers] It can control whether to turn the data store on or off.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Vid Prakash said that NVIDIA is the only option for shared computing needs.
At its annual Supercomputing 2023 event in November, NVIDIA announced the update. Grace Hopper Named after Superchips, a pioneering computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral. Looking to push AI development forward, Nvidia has revealed that it is working on developing quantum processing units (QPUs).
Earlier this year, Nvidia reported In the year Quarterly revenue increased 101% compared to the same period in 2022, bringing total revenue to $13.51 billion in the second quarter ended July 30.
Together AI, the spokesman, strongly believes in open source as a key part of the future of generative AI, rather than the emergence of a single dominant model, adding a variety of proprietary and open-source models.
“When you fine-tune the open source model, you have more depth of control,” he said. “And many of these customers are finding that they can achieve greater accuracy in their operations by fine-tuning an open source model rather than using a large proprietary model like GPT-4.”
The spokesperson emphasized the importance of using small open source models, which offer several benefits, including accuracy, ease of use, cost effectiveness and improved performance.
“So, for all those reasons, we think open source will be a major driver of how most organizations operate. Creative AIHe said.
Launched in June 2022, San Francisco-based Cooperative develops open-source AI cloud software. The team includes academics from Apple, ETH Zurich and Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and MIT.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.