FlexAI, a universal AI compute company, has launched with €28.5 million ($30 million) in seed funding led by Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), Elaia Partners, and Heartcore Capital. The additional investors include Bpifrance, Frst Capital, Motier Ventures, Partech, and InstaDeep CEO Karim Beguir.
FlexAI unlocks access to more computing and increased efficiency, with fewer challenges for developers. Delivered through an on-demand cloud service, FlexAI’s universal AI compute enables developers to seamlessly build and train AI applications with heterogeneous compute architectures. The company is rearchitecting compute infrastructure to accelerate breakthroughs made possible by advancements in AI.
FlexAI addresses the three main obstacles inhibiting AI innovation: a compute supply bottleneck, a global skills shortage, and unreliable processes for building and deploying AI models. And the company is creating an entirely new layer of software intelligence, abstraction, and orchestration into the AI compute stack, enabling developers to utilize multiple hardware configurations without arduous code changes. This expands access for compute, efficiently running AI workloads at lower costs than traditional GPU clusters, and making it easier to build AI applications.
FlexAI works with hardware leaders and cloud providers in the AI ecosystem, including AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Intel, and NVIDIA, as well as key companies developing AI models and products. The company will unveil its first commercial product later this year: an on-demand cloud service that connects developers to virtual heterogeneous computing, enabling them to run their workloads on various architectures to build and deploy AI models reliably and efficiently.
Launched and founded by former Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, Tesla, Lifen, and Zoox veterans Brijesh Tripathi and Dali Kilani, the FlexAI team combines deep experience in both hardware and software to build full-stack solutions to the AI computing crisis.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. The availability of AI compute today is limited to a select few. Our vision is to unlock access to compute for the many.”
- Brijesh Tripathi, CEO and co-founder of FlexAI
“AI is advancing in more directions than our current compute ecosystem can support. FlexAI has created a novel technology that opens access to diverse compute, supports a wide range of workloads, and accelerates innovation across the industry.”
- Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and FlexAI board member
“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 that 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. 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.”
- Antoine Blondeau, Managing Partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital
