AI Compute Startup Raises $30M, Emerges From Stealth

Universal AI compute startup FlexAI has come out of stealth with $30 million in seed funding to build infrastructure to power AI training workloads.

Founded last year, FlexAI counts Apple, Intel, Nvidia and Tesla alums in its ranks. The Paris-based startup is trying to shake up the infrastructure market with its on-demand cloud service.

Alpha Intelligence Capital, Elaia Partners and Heartcore Capital led the round. Bpifrance, Frst Capital, Motier Ventures, Partech and InstaDeep CEO Karim Beguir also invested.

The startup plans to launch its first commercial product later this year, a cloud service that connects developers to virtual compute, allowing users to run workloads across a swathe of different architectures including AWS, AMD and Nvidia. 

Flex wants developers to be able to train their models faster for cheaper than traditional GPU clusters.

“We believe in AI's transformative power to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, but it will require a 1000x magnitude more compute to be able to realize this vision,” said Brijesh Tripathi, FlexAI CEO and co-founder. “The availability of AI compute today is limited to a select few. Our vision is to unlock access to compute for the many.”

Tripathi was previously a hardware engineering leader at Tesla and most recently served as Intel’s vice president for accelerated computing systems and graphics.

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