Lemurian Labs recently announced it has secured $9 million in seed funding to develop an accelerated computing platform tailored explicitly for AI applications. This funding round was led by Oval Park Capital, with participation from Good Growth Capital, Raptor Group, and Alumni Ventures. Additional investments were from Untapped Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Silicon Catalyst Angels, Blue Lake Capital, Futureland Ventures, AI Operators Fund, and Tola Capital.
Built by a core team with experience at Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, Lemurian Labs was founded with the mission to democratize AI and, through the development and deployment of novel mathematical formulas, address several of the key challenges currently facing the industry.
AI is advancing with unprecedented speed, but the computing power needed to develop accurate models outpaces current hardware capabilities. And to keep up with increasingly demanding applications, GPUs are burning excessive power, making AI development extraordinarily costly and environmentally unsustainable. For example, deploying GPT3 at the scale of Google search would consume 400 megawatts – which is enough electricity to power up to about 360K conventionally-powered homes for an entire year, with costs exceeding $100 billion. Plus, the demand has created chip shortages, further halting development and resulting in only a select handful of massively capitalized companies that can even afford to run high-end AI models.
Lemurian Labs has been addressing these challenges by developing an accelerated computing platform that leverages a novel number system, referred to as PAL (parallel adaptive logarithm), to expedite AI workloads by up to 20 times greater throughput at a 1/10th of the total cost of legacy GPUs. And this combination of a new number system and co-designed hardware and software in their compute platform unleashes performance gains without scaling up power, enabling users to deploy more within the same power envelope. With faster AI workload deployments at lower costs, Lemurian Labs is accelerating developer productivity while making these solutions accessible to a wider range of businesses and organizations.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI models have grown in complexity and adoption at a rate so rapid that it is now stressing our current hardware infrastructure to the point of fracture. Models will continue to grow so we need fundamental changes in hardware in order to keep pace. We reimagined accelerated computing around the needs of AI models and its developers to bring down the cost and power consumption by 10X. This way we can fundamentally change the economics of AI such that any company can train and deploy LLMs, not just the fortunate few.”
- Jay Dawani, CEO and co-founder of Lemurian Labs
“Lemurian Labs is a venture that epitomizes our mission to invest in exceptional founders developing and commercializing disruptive technologies aimed at solving mission-critical global challenges. Unlike many of its hardware-first competitors, Lemurian leverages its proprietary parallel adaptive logarithm (PAL) numbering system and takes a software-centric approach to generate improvements in both realizable performance and energy efficiency, positioning Lemurian to redefine the AI processor landscape while enabling scalable, precise and energy-efficient AI solutions for nearly any use case.”
- Justin Wright-Eakes, Managing Partner at Oval Park Capital
