Malted AI raises £6M for cost-effective small language models

Scottish startup Malted AI announced today that it has secured £6 million in seed investment, led by Hoxton Ventures and joined by Creator Fund and angel investors. This brings the company’s funds to  £7 million in total.

Malted AI takes the output of large models and distils them into smaller models. Existing LLMs are overly general and result in very expensive enterprise solutions needing more pinpoint accuracy and performance. 

Malted AI’s technology allows enterprises to apply small language models (SLMs) that solve domain-specific problems with 10-100x cost savings. Instead of doing thousands of tasks moderately well, Malted AI’s SLMs do one task near perfectly.

Financial and legal firms are already using the firm’s technology in its first pilots, and further roll-out is planned for the rest of 2024.

According to Iain Mackie, Malted AI’s CEO and co-founder: 

“At Malted AI, we see smaller as better when it comes to AI. A single, many-billion parameter foundation model is costly, too general, and too slow- it's not fit for the purpose of the complex challenges enterprises face.” 

We are building a world-leading distillation platform that solves the highest-value enterprise problems. We do this by using cost-effective small language models (SLMs) that take the most useful parts of LLMs but with a performance exceeding its bigger ‘sibling’ at specific tasks that require domain knowledge.

 We envision enterprises using Malted AI to build small models to address singular challenges, effectively building a network of proprietary SLMs that are optimised for a single problem.”

Malted AI was born out of concepts that helped founders - Iain Mackie, Carlos Gammel and Federico Rossetto - win the 2022 Amazon Alexa Prize. They beat more than 100 teams to come top of one of the biggest AI competitions.

Today, Malted AI is a 10-strong team with a track record in AI innovation. Its founders include an ex-quant trader, a former-Meta researcher, and a maths champion who lead a team of world-class LLM and applied-AI talent hailing from Deepmind, Amazon, Google, Bloomberg and top PhDs, postdocs and academics from Scottish Universities. 

Bryan Gartner, Partner at Hoxton Ventures, said, 

“Malted AI has the capacity to be one of Europe’s most notable AI companies as they flip the thinking and approach to AI adoption within the enterprise.

Iain, Carlos and Federico are some of the brightest AI minds emerging from the birthplace of European AI — Edinburgh — and have close ties to the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.”

 Malted AI will use the new seed funding to invest in research, product development, and recruitment as it doubles the team size.

Lead image: Malted AI. Photo: uncredited.