A new platform designed by Canadian tech veterans Ali Asaria and Tony Salomone today announced a successful fundraising round that coincides with the platform’s worldwide launch.
Transformer Lab, designed to streamline research into artificial intelligence (AI) by replacing outdated, sometimes decades-old operating systems with a unified, modern operating system, announced a successful pre-seed fundraising round on Monday. The round includes participation from noteworthy firms on both sides of the Canada-US border, including Hawktail, Ripple Ventures, and Garage Capital.
Asaria declined to specify exactly how much the pre-seed investment round raised, but said the funding has been instrumental in scaling the platform and was critical in moving Transformer Lab to global deployment.
“We were going to build a research company; we ended up building the tools to build a research company.”
Ali Asaria, Transformer Lab
“We built out our first protocols of this system, and we started demoing to a select few folks in Canada and the US,” Asaria said. “We were basically trying to build enough runway and get enough funding so that we had enough time to take it to an enterprise launch, which is where we are now.”
Asaria and Salomone have been tinkering away on Transformer Lab for roughly the last year, which started as a passion project for the two long-time colleagues. During their early work, Asaria said the duo quickly recognized limitations in the tools being used across the industry.
“We started doing fundamental research…we were like ‘Hey, could we build our own transformer architecture from scratch and go head-to-head against some of the biggest players like OpenAI,” Asaria said. “In the process of doing that research we were just so surprised by the quality of tools to do it. We were building as we were going and saying, ‘what’s the cutting edge stuff out there?’ and every time we just kept hitting walls.”
“We basically learned that the maturity of the tool set is so behind the output of [the industry],” Asaria added. “So, we thought we were going to build a research company; we ended up building the tools to build a research company.”
Those tools are ones that Asaria hopes will become the standard for AI research labs. The platform brings together a single dashboard, scalability across personal hardware and high-performance computing clusters, robust customization, and a privacy-first design, according to Transformer Lab’s announcement.
Asaria and Salomone previously worked together at Asaria’s retail startups Tulip and Well.ca, one of Canada’s largest e-commerce companies.
While novel, Transformer Lab is already in use by some research institutes in North America, which are providing feedback to the team. As of Monday, the platform is available broadly to the public. Asaria said this recent funding and global deployment are a jumping-off point for a much larger vision.
“The real exciting opportunity for us is on one hand we’re trying to build tools for everyone to build an OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla-quality research lab,” Asaria said. “Those companies build their own tools internally. It was all proprietary, and we’re opening that up so anyone can build that quality of lab.”
Feature image courtesy Mauricio J Calero for BetaKit.