Gradient – an API platform for AI developers – recently announced it has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Mango Capital and Tokyo Black.
The funding round also included participation from The New Normal Fund, Secure Octane, and Global Founders Capital and dozens of leading AI & data practitioners from companies including Snowflake, Netflix, SAP, Figma, Airtable, Pinterest, Motive, and Openstore. This funding round will go toward developing Gradient’s enterprise-focused development platform, as well as furthering its mission of democratizing access to AI.
Gradient is the first company that enables companies to easily utilize their private data to build large scale custom AI models via their developer platform. And Gradient powers this developer experience using state-of-the-art LLMs such as Llama2. Through Gradient, developers are now able to create and combine thousands of tuned LLMs with minimal cost and complexity, which was not possible before.
Plus Gradient offers proprietary healthcare, finance, and law LLMs that customers can use to fine-tune to solve domain specific problems. Usage of the public platform is purely on demand and users only pay for the tokens consumed. Enterprises also have the option of paying for dedicated deployments.
The Gradient features include:
1.) Full Model Ownership – Companies developing on Gradient can retain full ownership and control over their AI applications.
2.) Rapid LLM creation – Gradient’s developer platform makes it exceptionally easy for users to tune hundreds of LLMs and embed models to solve complex use cases.
3.) State of the art domain expert LLMs – Gradient makes it possible for companies to build on Llama2 models and domain expert models for finance, healthcare, and law.
4.) Security and Privacy – Gradient can help companies build models in highly sensitive environments, protecting user data and privacy. Gradient is SOC2 and HIPAA compliant.
Application developers, product teams, and ML engineers at companies ranging from healthcare, financial services, marketing, media, and entertainment have used Gradient to develop and deploy generative AI applications that address diverse business needs.
The company was launched by Christopher Chang, Mark Huang, and Forrest Moret – who were previously working on AI products at Netflix, Google, and Splunk when they witnessed the lack of rapid development available for AI practitioners.
KEY QUOTES:
“We provide our customers with the easiest, truly on demand developer API for LLMs. This enables any company to quickly proliferate its AI augmented workforce and maintain competitive advantage.”
- Christopher Chang, co-founder and CEO of Gradient
“Building a custom, production-ready AI application typically requires a team of data engineers, machine learning experts, and data scientists – a huge amount of infrastructure investment – but that’s all set to change. AI development is moving at breakneck speeds, and the Gradient team has built a platform that really provides the best of both worlds – simplifying the development process, but also allowing developers the flexibility to work with the best-in-class open-source models and to leverage tools like Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Pinecone.”
- Chris Zeoli, Partner at Wing VC
“Working with Gradient has really changed the way we think about harnessing AI.”
- Leo Pekelis, Head of Data at Cloudtrucks
