London's Klu raises $1.7M for large language model application platform

UK-based large language model application platform Klu, has raised a $1.7 million Pre-seed funding round led by Firstminute Capital and included participation from a16z, Sequoia Capital, Craft Ventures, and Atomico and angel investors from Superhuman, IBM, Productboard and others.

Recent raises in this space include TitanML's $2.8 million Pre-seed round and Tidalflow's $1.7 million fundraise for its AI plugin platform.

Klu, with offices in London and San Francisco, was founded by Stephen M. Walker II (CEO) and Stefan Sabev (CTO) in 2022.

Walker had spotted a pain point for those trying to launch companies leveraging AI and together with Sabev decided to tackle the issue with ‘an AI copilot embedded in every software product, understanding each user’s context and needs. Klu provides the tools to make this future a reality today’.

Its LLM application platform for building, evaluating and optimising AI applications offers a suite of integrated products enabling companies to quickly go from idea to optimised LLM-powered features built on large language models like GPT-4. Since its beta launch in March it has been serving over 500,000 requests weekly, experiencing an average weekly growth rate of ten percent.

“The layoffs of late 2022 shifted modelling work from data scientists to product teams consuming AI APIs. These new AI Teams use Klu to launch LLM-powered features in days that outperform old models built over months,” says Walker.

Klu supports all major LLM providers (including OpenAI, Azure Openai, GCP Vertex, AWS Bedrock) while also offering seamless connections to data sources, including 24 file types. It counts Colab, Zavvy, and Productlane amongst its customers.

“With Klu, knowledge workers can spin up AI-based internal workflows to automate repetitive tasks and embed AI workflows into their products for customers to experience. This is a major product challenge which is why Stephen and Stefan with their prior roles at Productboard and Skyscanner are the right duo to solve this problem,” says Sam Endacott of Firstminute Capital.

Lead image: Klu founders Stefan Sabev (CTO) and Stephen M. Walker II (CEO) via Klu. Photo: Nataliya Dimova.