Lemurian Labs has raised $9 million in seed funding to solve several problems associated with artificial intelligence (AI). These include making the technology affordable and environmentally sustainable.
Oval Park Capital led the round with participation from Good Growth Capital, Raptor Group and Alumni Ventures among others. Additional investments came from Untapped Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Silicon Catalyst Angels, Blue Lake Capital, Futureland Ventures, AI Operators Fund, and Tola Capital.
AI is advancing with unprecedented speed, but the computing power needed to develop accurate models is outpacing current hardware capabilities, according to Lemurian Labs.
Lemurian Labs claims its solution can accelerate developer productivity and make AI accessible to a wider range of businesses.
To keep up with increasingly demanding applications, GPUs are burning an exorbitant amount of power, making AI development extremely costly and environmentally unsustainable. In addition, the demand has created chip shortages, further halting development, resulting in only a select handful of massively capitalized companies that can even afford to run high-end AI models.
Jay Dawani, CEO and co-founder of Lemurian Labs, said that AI models will continue to grow so we need fundamental changes in hardware in order to keep pace. “We reimagined accelerated computing around the needs of AI models and its developers to bring down the cost and power consumption by 10-times,” he said.
“This way we can fundamentally change the economics of AI such that any company can train and deploy LLMs (large language models), not just the fortunate few.”
Lemurian Labs is attempting to address these challenges with the development of an accelerated computing platform that uses a novel number system to expedite AI workloads at a lower cost. The company said its solution can accelerate developer productivity while making AI accessible to a wider range of businesses.
The Toronto-based startup’s core team brings experience from Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. Lemurian Labs was founded with the mission to democratize AI, and through the development and deployment of novel mathematical formulas, address several of the key challenges currently facing the industry.
RELATED: Cohere secures strategic investment from SAP as enterprise demand for generative AI grows
A case in point, for example, is Cohere and a pair of other major generative AI firms: San Francisco’s Anthropic and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, which secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Germany’s SAP.
The investments were announced shortly after SAP subsiduary Sapphire Ventures (formerly known as SAP Ventures) announced a more than $1-billion commitment to generative AI startups. According to SAP, they “underscore [its] aim to create an open enterprise AI ecosystem for the future.”
LLMs require lots of money and computing power to train, which has required Cohere and its competitors to raise significant amounts of capital and partner with cloud giants to develop their tech.
Feature image courtesy Pixabay. Photo by Gerd Altmann.