AI Startup Roundup: Google, Nvidia Back Machine Learning Startup

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CentML

Split between Toronto and San Francisco, the CentML team is working on a software platform to improve the performance and cost of deploying machine learning models.

The CentML platform is designed to improve performance without reducing model accuracy. The company claims to offer an optimized Meta Llama 2 model that works three times faster on the previous generation of GPUs, reducing running costs by 60%.

Latest funding: $27 million, seed round

Lead investors: Google’s Gradient Ventures

Investors: Nvidia, Deloitte Ventures, Thomson Reuters Ventures,  Radical Ventures

LegalMation

Los Angeles-based LegalMation offers an AI-powered platform to help legal professionals. Its tech can help with responding to lawsuits, discovery requests and related workflows using the client’s own historical response data.

LegalMation’s solutions are used by enterprise clients such as Walmart, as well as law firms including Sheppard Mullin, Nelson Mullins and Baker Donelson.

Latest funding: $15 million, series A

Lead investor: Aquiline Capital Partners

Other investors: Motley Fool Ventures, REV Venture Partners, Key Venture Partners, Quick Set and Brentwood Investments

Funding plans: LegalMation will use the new funds to improve the functionality of its platform and devote resources to building new end-to-end litigation workflow automation and analytic tools.

Twelve Labs

Based in South Korea, Twelve Labs creates infrastructure for multimodal AI offerings.

The startup, which has a presence in San Francesco, helps customers build intelligent video applications.

Twelve Labs built its own video-language foundation model, Pegasus-1, an 80 billion parameter model that can produce text outputs from video inputs.

Latest funding: $9.7 million, pre-series A

Investors: Nvidia, Samsung Next, Korea Investment Partners

Leucine

Leucine builds AI-powered platforms for compliance monitoring for pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The platform combines manufacturer environments into one integrated digital environment, providing insights on potential compliance risks. Pharma giants like Mylan and Dr. Reddy’s are listed as users on its website.

Latest funding: $7 million, series A

Lead investor: Ecolab

Other investors: Pravega Ventures

Klu

Split between London and San Francisco, the team at Klu are creating a large language model application platform for building, evaluating and optimizing AI applications.

Klu’s platform offers tools for prototyping and accessing leading AI models like GPT-4 and Llama 2. Colab, Zavvy, and Productlane are among its customers.

Latest funding:  $1.7 million pre-seed round

Lead investor: Firstminute Capital

Other investors: a16z, Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, Atomico