Meeting the demand for computing power needed for AI models, while allowing developers to train them in a simpler, more efficient and cost-effective way, is FlexAI’s ambition. A young Parisian start-up announces that it has just completed an initial round of funding that will allow it to bring its first product to market within a few months: FlexAI Cloud.
Co-founded last October by Brijesh Tripathi and Dali Kilani, former directors of Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, Tesla, Lifen and Zoox, FlexAI now has about forty collaborators, among them former employees of DeepMind or Google. If the start-up has offices in the United States, in San Francisco and in Bangalore, India, the two co-founders say they decided to set it up in Paris because of the vitality of the French artificial intelligence ecosystem.
The 28.5 million euros collected during this round of financing, which brought it out of the hidden mode of operation, comes entirely from European funds. It was led by Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), Elaia Partners and Heartcore Capital, joined by Bpifrance, Frst Capital, Motier Ventures, Partech, as well as Karim Beguir, CEO of InstaDeep.
Antoine Blondeau, managing partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital, says:
“Compute lags behind, not leads, the increasingly powerful capabilities of AI models. In order to realize the potential of artificial intelligence, the industry must address the computing costs and complexity of the technology stack, which significantly increase development costs and time to market. Brijesh and Dali uniquely possess the hardware and software skills to design and build an AI compute orchestration layer ecosystem.”
FlexAI Cloud: an on-demand solution
FlexAI aims to address the three biggest obstacles holding back AI innovation: a bottleneck in the supply of computing power, a global skills shortage, and complex and unreliable processes for developing and deploying AI models.
Brijesh Tripathi, CEO and co-founder of FlexAI, explains:
“We believe in the transformative power of artificial intelligence to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, but it will take 1,000 times more computing power to realize this vision. AI computing power today is limited to a privileged few. Our vision is to unlock access to computing for all”.
The two co-founders, who met at Nvidia, aim not only to simplify access to computing power for developers subject to budget constraints, but to give them access to a diverse range of computing, offering Choose between multiple hardware configurations without the need to modify code. Depending on their needs, FlexAI Cloud will take advantage of computing capacities and infrastructures not only from Nvidia, but also from AMD, Intel, AWS, Google Cloud or Scaleway.
They cooperate with these companies, but as partners they also have Mistral AI, InstaDeep, Hugging Face as well as Tenstorrent, whose CEO, Jim Keller, is a member of FlexAI’s board of directors.
Building a “universal AI architecture” in Europe
This fundraising will allow them to strengthen their team and accelerate the implementation of their cloud solution for European and international companies. However, FlexAI’s managers are looking further: the start-up is considering new fundraising to establish its own data centers.