Klu – a leading large language model (LLM) application platform for building, evaluating, and optimizing AI applications – recently announced that it has raised a $1.7 million pre-seed funding round led by Firstminute Capital. Scouts from top VC firms, including a16z, Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, and Atomico, also participated alongside angel investors from Superhuman, IBM, Productboard, and other leading technology companies.
The new funding round will fuel Klu’s mission to power the rapid emergence of dedicated AI engineers and teams across organizations. And Klu offers integrated products enabling companies to quickly go from idea to optimized LLM-powered features built on large language models like GPT-4.
Founded in 2022 by Stephen M. Walker II (CEO) and Stefan Sabev (CTO) and having launched its closed beta launch in March, Klu has been serving over 500,000 requests weekly, experiencing an impressive average weekly growth rate of 10%. And Klu – which has offices in London and San Francisco, predominantly (but not exclusively) – counts B2B SaaS companies as clients, with customers including Colab, Zavvy, and Productlane.
Klu’s goal aligns with the accelerating trend of high-growth startups forming specialized squads focused solely on identifying AI use cases and bringing them to market. But these nascent teams often struggle with infrastructure complexity, slow iteration cycles, and a lack of dedicated tooling.
Klu is overcoming these hurdles through products like Klu Studio for quick prototyping, Klu Engine for accessing leading AI models like GPT-4 and Llama 2, Klu Eval for running AI-powered evals on new iterations, and Klu Optimize for leveraging real-world usage data to improve outputs with fine-tuning continually.
Several early adopters attempted to build similar platforms on their own but ran into challenges, setbacks, and maintenance issues. And learning from these pain points, Klu optimized its solution so that now any business can deploy, observe, and optimize an advanced LLM-enabled feature in under 10 minutes – a process that would take months or quarters when building internal ops systems.
Klu supports all major LLM providers (including OpenAI, Azure Openai, GCP Vertex, AWS Bedrock) while offering seamless connections to data sources, including 24 file types. And customers can then effortlessly integrate their Klu-created LLM apps with various partners, including Salesforce, Atlassian, Supabase, Asana, Intercom, Zendesk, Slack, Notion, and Google. Builders know that getting to production is only the beginning, and Klu customers receive continuous observability insights and evaluation of prompt changes as AI engineers update features and prompts.
Klu CEO and co-founder Stephen M. Walker II previously felt the pain of leveraging AI firsthand, where week-long hackathon projects struggled to make it out the door and into customers’ hands. And this inspired him to start Klu with co-founder Stefan Sabev. Their vision is an AI copilot embedded in every software product, understanding each user’s context and needs. And Klu provides the tools to make this future a reality today.
KEY QUOTES:
“The layoffs of late 2022 shifted modeling work from data scientists to product teams consuming AI APIs. These new AI Teams use Klu to launch LLM-powered features in days that outperform old models built over months.”
“We are just getting started on our mission to empower every company to build their AI moat through proprietary models and data flywheel. Klu provides the AI backbone to usher in this next era of intelligent software experiences.”
— Klu CEO and co-founder Stephen M. Walker II
“We are thrilled to back Klu as they enable the next generation of AI-powered software. With Klu, knowledge workers can spin up AI-based internal workflows to automate repetitive tasks and embed AI workflows into their products for customers to experience. This is a major product challenge which is why Stephen and Stefan with their prior roles at Productboard and Skyscanner are the right duo to solve this problem.”
— Sam Endacott of Firstminute Capital
