French startup FlexAI exits stealth with $30M to ease entry to AI compute

A French startup has raised a hefty seed funding to “rearchitect compute infrastructure” for builders wanting to construct and practice AI purposes extra effectively.

FlexAI, as the corporate is known as, has been working in stealth since October 2023, however the Paris-based firm is formally launching Wednesday with €28.5 million ($30 million) in funding, whereas teasing its first product: an on-demand cloud service for AI coaching.

It is a chunky little bit of change for a seed spherical, which usually means actual substantial founder pedigree — and that’s the case right here. FlexAI co-founder and CEO Brijesh Tripathi was beforehand a senior design engineer at GPU big and now AI darling Nvidia, earlier than touchdown in numerous senior engineering and architecting roles at Apple; Tesla (working instantly underneath Elon Musk); Zoox (earlier than Amazon acquired the autonomous driving startup); and, most lately, Tripathi was VP of Intel’s AI and tremendous compute platform offshoot, AXG.

FlexAI co-founder and CTO Dali Kilani has a formidable CV, too, serving in numerous technical roles at corporations together with Nvidia and Zynga, whereas most lately filling the CTO position at French startup Lifen, which develops digital infrastructure for the healthcare trade.

The seed spherical was led by Alpha Intelligence Capital (AIC), Elaia Companions and Heartcore Capital, with participation from Frst Capital, Motier Ventures, Partech and InstaDeep CEO Karim Beguir.

The compute conundrum

To know what Tripathi and Kilani are trying with FlexAI, it’s first price understanding what builders and AI practitioners are up towards when it comes to accessing “compute”; this refers back to the processing energy, infrastructure and assets wanted to hold out computational duties reminiscent of processing knowledge, operating algorithms, and executing machine studying fashions.

“Utilizing any infrastructure within the AI house is complicated; it’s not for the faint-of-heart, and it’s not for the inexperienced,” Tripathi instructed For Millionaires. “It requires you to know an excessive amount of about how you can construct infrastructure earlier than you should use it.”

Against this, the general public cloud ecosystem that has advanced these previous couple of many years serves as a fantastic instance of how an trade has emerged from builders’ must construct purposes with out worrying an excessive amount of concerning the again finish.

“In case you are a small developer and wish to write an software, you don’t must know the place it’s being run, or what the again finish is — you simply must spin up an EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute cloud) occasion and also you’re finished,” Tripathi stated. “You’ll be able to’t try this with AI compute at present.”

Within the AI sphere, builders should work out what number of GPUs (graphics processing items) they should interconnect over what kind of community, managed via a software program ecosystem that they’re solely answerable for establishing. If a GPU or community fails, or if something in that chain goes awry, the onus is on the developer to type it.

“We wish to convey AI compute infrastructure to the identical degree of simplicity that the final objective cloud has gotten to — after 20 years, sure, however there isn’t any cause why AI compute can’t see the identical advantages,” Tripathi stated. “We wish to get to some extent the place operating AI workloads doesn’t require you to turn out to be knowledge centre consultants.”

With the present iteration of its product going via its paces with a handful of beta clients, FlexAI will launch its first industrial product later this yr. It’s principally a cloud service that connects builders to “digital heterogeneous compute,” which means that they will run their workloads and deploy AI fashions throughout a number of architectures, paying on a utilization foundation somewhat than renting GPUs on a dollars-per-hour foundation.

GPUs are important cogs in AI improvement, serving to coach and run massive language fashions (LLMs), for instance. Nvidia is among the preeminent gamers within the GPU house, and one of many important beneficiaries of the AI revolution sparked by OpenAI and ChatGPT. Within the 12 months since OpenAI launched an API for ChatGPT in March 2023, permitting builders to bake ChatGPT performance into their very own apps, Nvidia’s shares ballooned from round $500 billion to more than $2 trillion.

LLMs are pouring out of the expertise trade, with demand for GPUs skyrocketing in tandem. However GPUs are costly to run, and renting them from a cloud supplier for smaller jobs or ad-hoc use-cases doesn’t all the time make sense and will be prohibitively costly; this is the reason AWS has been dabbling with time-limited leases for smaller AI initiatives. However renting remains to be renting, which is why FlexAI needs to summary away the underlying complexities and let clients entry AI compute on an as-needed foundation.

“Multicloud for AI”

FlexAI’s place to begin is that almost all builders don’t actually look after probably the most half whose GPUs or chips they use, whether or not it’s Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Graphcore or Cerebras. Their important concern is with the ability to develop their AI and construct purposes inside their budgetary constraints.

That is the place FlexAI’s idea of “common AI compute” is available in, the place FlexAI takes the person’s necessities and allocates it to no matter structure is smart for that exact job, taking good care of the all the mandatory conversions throughout the completely different platforms, whether or not that’s Intel’s Gaudi infrastructure, AMD’s Rocm or Nvidia’s CUDA.

“What this implies is that the developer is simply centered on constructing, coaching and utilizing fashions,” Tripathi stated. “We care for the whole lot beneath. The failures, restoration, reliability, are all managed by us, and also you pay for what you utilize.”

In some ways, FlexAI is getting down to fast-track for AI what has already been occurring within the cloud, which means greater than replicating the pay-per-usage mannequin: It means the flexibility to go “multicloud” by leaning on the completely different advantages of various GPU and chip infrastructures.

For instance, FlexAI will channel a buyer’s particular workload relying on what their priorities are. If an organization has restricted funds for coaching and fine-tuning their AI fashions, they will set that throughout the FlexAI platform to get the utmost quantity of compute bang for his or her buck. This may imply going via Intel for cheaper (however slower) compute, but when a developer has a small run that requires the quickest attainable output, then it may be channeled via Nvidia as an alternative.

Underneath the hood, FlexAI is principally an “aggregator of demand,” renting the {hardware} itself via conventional means and, utilizing its “robust connections” with the oldsters at Intel and AMD, secures preferential costs that it spreads throughout its personal buyer base. This doesn’t essentially imply side-stepping the kingpin Nvidia, nevertheless it presumably does imply that to a big extent — with Intel and AMD fighting for GPU scraps left in Nvidia’s wake — there’s a large incentive for them to play ball with aggregators reminiscent of FlexAI.

“If I could make it work for patrons and produce tens to a whole bunch of consumers onto their infrastructure, they [Intel and AMD] will likely be very glad,” Tripathi stated.

This sits in distinction to comparable GPU cloud gamers within the house such because the well-funded CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, that are centered squarely on Nvidia {hardware}.

“I wish to get AI compute to the purpose the place the present common objective cloud computing is,” Tripathi famous. “You’ll be able to’t do multicloud on AI. You must choose particular {hardware}, variety of GPUs, infrastructure, connectivity, after which preserve it your self. As we speak, that’s that’s the one technique to really get AI compute.”

When requested who the precise launch companions are, Tripathi stated that he was unable to call all of them on account of a scarcity of “formal commitments” from a few of them.

“Intel is a powerful companion, they’re undoubtedly offering infrastructure, and AMD is a companion that’s offering infrastructure,” he stated. “However there’s a second layer of partnerships which are occurring with Nvidia and a few different silicon corporations that we aren’t but able to share, however they’re all within the combine and MOUs [memorandums of understanding] are being signed proper now.”

The Elon impact

Tripathi is greater than geared up to cope with the challenges forward, having labored in a number of the world’s largest tech corporations.

“I do know sufficient about GPUs; I used to construct GPUs,” Tripathi stated of his seven-year stint at Nvidia, ending in 2007 when he jumped ship for Apple because it was launching the primary iPhone. “At Apple, I grew to become centered on fixing actual buyer issues. I used to be there when Apple began constructing their first SoCs [system on chips] for telephones.”

Tripathi additionally spent two years at Tesla from 2016 to 2018 as {hardware} engineering lead, the place he ended up working instantly underneath Elon Musk for his final six months after two individuals above him abruptly left the corporate.

“At Tesla, the factor that I discovered and I’m taking into my startup is that there are not any constraints apart from science and physics,” he stated. “How issues are finished at present is just not the way it must be or must be finished. It’s best to go after what the correct factor to do is from first rules, and to try this, take away each black field.”

Tripathi was concerned in Tesla’s transition to creating its personal chips, a transfer that has since been emulated by GM and Hyundai, amongst different automakers.

“One of many first issues I did at Tesla was to determine what number of microcontrollers there are in a automotive, and to try this, we actually needed to type via a bunch of these huge black containers with steel shielding and casing round it, to search out these actually tiny small microcontrollers in there,” Tripathi stated. “And we ended up placing that on a desk, laid it out and stated, ‘Elon, there are 50 microcontrollers in a automotive. And we pay typically 1,000 occasions margins on them as a result of they’re shielded and guarded in a giant steel casing.’ And he’s like, ‘let’s go make our personal.’ And we did that.”

GPUs as collateral

Wanting additional into the longer term, FlexAI has aspirations to construct out its personal infrastructure, too, together with knowledge facilities. This, Tripathi stated, will likely be funded by debt financing, constructing on a current pattern that has seen rivals within the house including CoreWeave and Lambda Labs use Nvidia chips as collateral to safe loans — somewhat than giving extra fairness away.

“Bankers now know how you can use GPUs as collaterals,” Tripathi stated. “Why give away fairness? Till we turn out to be an actual compute supplier, our firm’s worth is just not sufficient to get us the a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} wanted to put money into constructing knowledge centres. If we did solely fairness, we disappear when the cash is gone. But when we really financial institution it on GPUs as collateral, they will take the GPUs away and put it in another knowledge heart.”