BURLINGAME, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gradient, an API platform for AI developers, announced today it has raised $10 million in seed funding led by Wing VC, with participation from Mango Capital and Tokyo Black. The round also included participation from The New Normal Fund, Secure Octane, and Global Founders Capital as well as dozens of leading AI & data practitioners from companies including Snowflake, Netflix, SAP, Figma, Airtable, Pinterest, Motive, and Openstore. The funding will go toward developing Gradient’s enterprise-focused development platform, as well as furthering its mission of democratizing access to AI.
Gradient is the first company that allows companies to easily leverage their private data to build large scale custom AI models via their developer platform. Gradient powers this developer experience using state-of-the-art LLMs such as Llama2. Using Gradient, developers are now able to create and combine thousands of tuned LLMs with minimal cost and complexity, which was not possible before.
Gradient also offers proprietary healthcare, finance, and law LLMs that customers can further fine-tune to solve domain specific problems. Usage of the public platform is purely on demand – users only pay for the tokens consumed. Enterprises also have the option of paying for dedicated deployments.
"Building a custom, production-ready AI application typically requires a team of data engineers, machine learning experts, and data scientists – a huge amount of infrastructure investment – but that’s all set to change," said Chris Zeoli, Partner at Wing VC. "AI development is moving at breakneck speeds, and the Gradient team has built a platform that really provides the best of both worlds – simplifying the development process, but also allowing developers the flexibility to work with the best-in-class open-source models and to leverage tools like Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Pinecone."
Gradient features include:
- Full Model Ownership: Companies developing on Gradient can retain full ownership and control over their AI applications.
- Rapid LLM creation: Gradient's developer platform makes it exceptionally easy for users to tune hundreds of LLMs and embed models to solve complex use cases.
- State of the art domain expert LLMs: Gradient makes it possible for companies to build on Llama2 models and domain expert models for finance, healthcare, and law.
- Security and Privacy: Gradient can help companies productionize models in highly sensitive environments, protecting user data and privacy. Gradient is SOC2 and HIPAA compliant.
“We provide our customers with the easiest, truly on demand developer API for LLMs," said Christopher Chang, co-founder and CEO of Gradient. "This enables any company to quickly proliferate its AI augmented workforce and maintain competitive advantage."
Application developers, product teams, and ML engineers at companies spanning healthcare, financial services, marketing, media, and entertainment have used Gradient to develop and deploy generative AI applications that address diverse business needs.
“Working with Gradient has really changed the way we think about harnessing AI,” said Leo Pekelis, Head of Data at Cloudtrucks.
Gradient has been publicly available for enterprise and self-service developer access. The company was founded by Christopher Chang, Mark Huang, and Forrest Moret, who were previously working on AI products at Netflix, Google, and Splunk when they witnessed the lack of rapid development available for AI practitioners.
About Gradient
Founded by AI veterans from Netflix, Google, and Splunk, Gradient is an AI platform that empowers enterprises to leverage their private data to build custom AI solutions. Gradient specializes in serving enterprises in healthcare and financial services, by providing specially trained domain expert models that outperform competitors. Gradient is on a mission to democratize AI access and power the next million AI models through its AI Cloud platform. The company has nearly 20 employees and is based in Burlingame, CA.