Startup company Neural Magic announced its open $15 million seed funding investment today.
Seed Funding for Neural Magic
Neural Magic, a startup company composed of MIT professors developed a new machine learning model that can be used on normal household computers. They are opening a budget of $15 million for seed funding investment starting today.
Comcast Ventures led the way with NEA, Pillar VC, Andreessen Horowitz, and Amdocs joining the venture. Neural Magic also received a five million dollar pre-seed funding which jacks up the total raised amount to $20 million.
An early release of the product was released for the public for reference. An inference engine that is programmable to run in a basic home computer set-up, no need for specialized chips and expensive GPU set-ups. With this pilot product being released, it showcases the reduced cost in running machine learning programs as compared to traditional set-ups.
The project was mainly consolidated by two great minds from MIT, Professor Nir Shavit and his co-founder Alex Mateev.
I discovered that with the right algorithms we could run these machine learning models just by using commodity hardware, and that is where we started
-Nir Shavit
People are used to the concept that AI technology needs specialized chips and computer set-ups in order to execute algorithms. With this innovation that our company is introducing. Not only does this concept work on commodity hardware but it also applies to more modern development programs such as microservices.
Neural Magic seems to be a thorn for traditional businesses that are manufacturing expensive and commercialized products for machine learning technology. Here, we want to inspire startup developers by making machine learning technology accessible with just the use of an inexpensive commodity computer set-up.
Lead investor Comcast Venture believes that this project has a huge market, especially since it highlights the use of inexpensive tools like commodity hardware.
This startup company is well on its way to using software to replace high-cost, specialized AI hardware. Using a software favors most users since it unlocks the true potential of deep learning.
-Gil Beyada, Managing Director, Comcast Venture
The vision of the startup company according to founder Nir Shavit,
Our vision is to enable data science enthusiasts to take advantage of existing computing platforms and run deep learning models with the use of basic commodity hardwares that are readily available.
