Paris-based FlexAI, an AI compute company, on Wednesday, April 24, announced its launch with $30M (approximately €28.5M) in a seed funding round led by Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), Elaia Partners, and Heartcore Capital.
The company will use the funds to accelerate the commercialisation of its universal AI compute.
Later this year, the company is planning to launch its first commercial product – an on-demand cloud service that connects developers with virtual heterogeneous compute. This service will allow developers to run their workloads on various architectures to create and deploy AI models efficiently and reliably.
What does FlexAI solve?
FlexAI aims to overcome the three main challenges that delay AI innovation:
- Limited supply of computing power
- Shortage of skilled professionals
- Complex and unreliable processes for building and deploying AI models
Founded and led by ex-Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, Tesla, Lifen, and Zoox veterans Brijesh Tripathi and Dali Kilani, FlexAI offers AI developers on-demand cloud service to build and train AI apps using heterogeneous compute architectures.
“We believe in AI’s transformative power to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, but it will require a 1000x magnitude more compute to be able to realise this vision,” says Brijesh Tripathi, CEO and co-founder of FlexAI.
The company does this by developing a new layer of software intelligence, abstraction, and orchestration in the AI compute stack.
This will allow developers to use multiple hardware configurations without having to make extensive changes to their code.
As a result, access to computing resources will be expanded, AI workloads will be run more efficiently at lower costs compared to traditional GPU clusters, and building AI applications will become easier.
“The availability of AI compute today is limited to a select few. Our vision is to unlock access to compute for the many,” adds Tripathi.
Currently, the company works with hardware leaders and cloud providers across the AI ecosystem, including AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Intel, and NVIDIA, as well as key companies developing AI models and products.
“AI is advancing in more directions than our current compute ecosystem can support,” says Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and FlexAI board member.
“FlexAI has created a novel technology that opens access to diverse compute, supports a wide range of workloads, and accelerates innovation across the industry,” adds Keller.
The company is backed by AIC, Elaia Partners, Bpifrance, Frst Capital, Heartcore Capital, Motier Ventures, Partech, and InstaDeep CEO, Karim Beguir.
The investor
Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC) is an entrepreneurs-led, entrepreneurs-invested, global closed-end private venture capital fund.
The VC invests in Seed to Series B, deep Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) technology-based companies.
The company focuses on teams applying deep expertise in the algorithmic sciences to develop breakthrough products and solve real business problems.
“Compute is lagging, not leading, AI models’ increasingly potent capabilities. To deliver on AI’s potential, the industry has to solve the issue of compute costs and of stack complexity — both of which dramatically increase development costs and time to market. Brijesh and Dali, uniquely, have the hardware and software skill sets to architect and build the ecosystem for the AI compute orchestration layer,” says Antoine Blondeau, Managing Partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital.
“This is our second fund’s first investment in France. FlexAI’s choice of Paris as its headquarters illustrates the vibrancy of the French AI ecosystem, with the presence of a first-rate scientific base, world-class founders, and, increasingly, access to global capital, in turn enabling global ambitions,” adds Blondeau.
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