FlexAI comes out of stealth with $30M Seed raise for increased compute

AI compute company FlexAI came out of stealth yesterday with a $30M seed raise led by Alpha Intelligence Capital, Elaia Partners, and Heartcore Capital.

FlexAI’s first product, which will launch later this year, is an on-demand cloud service that connects developers to virtual heterogeneous compute, enabling them to run their workloads on a variety of architectures to build and deploy AI models

The Paris-based company aims to address the three biggest obstacles inhibiting AI innovation: a compute supply bottleneck, a global skills shortage, and complex, unreliable processes for building and deploying AI models. The company is building a layer of software intelligence, abstraction, and orchestration into the AI compute stack in order to enable developers to utilise multiple hardware configurations without arduous code changes.

Founded and led by ex-Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, Tesla, Lifen, and Zoox alumni, FlexAI has collaborated with hardware leaders and cloud providers across the AI ecosystem, including AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Intel, and NVIDIA.

"Compute is lagging, not leading, AI models' increasingly potent capabilities. To deliver on AI's potential, the industry has to solve the issue of compute costs and that of stack complexity -- both of which dramatically increase development costs and time to market. Brijesh and Dali, uniquely, have the hardware and software skill sets to architect and build the ecosystem for the AI compute orchestration layer," said Antoine Blondeau, Managing Partner at Alpha Intelligence Capital.

“AI is advancing in more directions than our current compute ecosystem can support,” said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent and FlexAI board member. “FlexAI has created a novel technology that opens access to diverse compute, supports a wide range of workloads, and accelerates innovation across the industry.”