AI infrastructure company Lumino announced that it had raised a $2.8 million pre-seed funding round. This funding round included Longhash Ventures, Inception Ventures, Protocol Labs, TRGC, L2IV, Zero Knowledge Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Quaker Capital Investments, OrangeDAO, and Escape Velocity.
Training artificial intelligence models depends on a large amount of computing power, leading to surges in GPU prices. And larger enterprises have been reserving GPUs, making renting them out challenging for other companies. As a result, large public providers can decide which companies can build artificial intelligence, causing censorship and bias.
Eshan Chordia and Yogesh Darji founded Lumino in July 2023 to address these issues. Lumino is developing an integrated hardware and software compute protocol for AI workloads.
This protocol utilizes economic incentives to bring compute resources together, blockchain for ensuring models are correctly trained, and an SDK for developers to get started instantly. Customers can begin training their AI models in minutes with the Lumino SDK, and they see AI computing costs decrease by up to 80% as compared to traditional cloud providers.
Chordia previously designed Filecoin cryptoeconomics at Protocol Labs, created the world’s most advanced AI-powered wildfire risk model at Zesty.ai, and launched Nootry (a mobile product for helping people find healthy food at restaurants).
Darji previously led infrastructure at TaxBit and Twilio to process billions of transactions daily. And he also built large-scale distributed systems at AWS on the EC2 core platform team and launched a carpooling app to help solve traffic problems in metropolitan cities.
