FlexAI launches with $30M in seed funding to unlock ‘universal compute’ for AI workloads – Business
Paris-based artificial intelligence startup FlexAI launched today with $30 million in seed funding, led by Alpha Intelligence Capital, Elaia Partners and Heartcore Capital, to build its on-demand infrastructure for AI workloads.
The startup’s flagship product is an on-demand service that allows developers access to various cloud providers for training and deploying AI models arriving later this year. Similar to a public cloud service, its new infrastructure offering will allow developers to run AI workloads without adjusting for what graphical processing units, storage systems or networking it will execute on.
The company works with hardware makers and cloud providers across the AI ecosystem, such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Intel Corp., Nvidia Corp., Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Inc., as well as companies developing AI models. The startup said it’s building an entirely new layer that will make training and deployment simple without the need for code changes by using software intelligence, abstraction and orchestration.
“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 realize this vision,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Brijesh Tripathi. “The availability of AI compute today is limited to a select few. Our vision is to unlock access to compute for the many.”
The startup essentially acts to allocate compute resources for developers and rents hardware from traditional cloud providers. By using this model and dynamically adjusting workloads for AI applications, developers can pay for services on-demand rather than renting GPUs by the hour from big cloud vendors, allowing a way to save significantly on costs.
The cloud AI market size has grown significantly in recent years. According to a report from Fortune Business Insights, it was valued at $60.4 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to more than $398 billion by 2030. The demand for cloud computing to drive AI in day-to-day operations continues to ramp up, with costs for training and deployment workloads following quickly, the use of generative AI in an application can break the bank for small developers as the audience for their apps increases.
“AI is advancing in more directions than our current compute ecosystem can support,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and a 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.”