(Reuters) – AI startup Nomic has secured $17 million in funds through a recent funding round led by Coatue, according to statements from the companies. The New York-based Nomic AI, which initially comprised a team of four, now boasts a valuation of $100 million. This investment highlights the ongoing interest of venture capitalists in supporting small teams that develop popular AI products. In addition to Coatue, Contrary Capital and Betaworks Ventures also participated in the funding round.
Established in 2022, Nomic has already released two products. The first is an open-source AI model named GPT4ALL, which is available for free download and can be run on various devices, such as laptops. The second product, called Atlas, is a tool that allows users to visualize unstructured datasets used for constructing large language models (LLM).
Nomic’s objective is to enhance the visibility of datasets in model training and democratize access to AI models. Andriy Mulyar, co-founder at Nomic AI, stated, “We want to enable people to access the most powerful models that are tailored to their specific use cases and empower them to build these systems themselves. It is crucial for them to comprehend the data that contributes to these systems.” The funding received by Nomic will primarily be allocated towards hiring new talent and further developing their products.
About 50,000 developers from various companies, including Hugging Face, have utilized Nomic’s products. The startup has also established partnerships with MongoDB and Replit.
Open-source models are being considered as alternatives to proprietary models developed by AI labs like OpenAI and Google. As researchers worldwide collaborate to create models that can rival GPT-4, these open-source models offer privacy advantages through locally hosted models. “It gives you the platform for privacy with a local model, which will become more important as people have unique data that they want to interact with LLM,” explained Sri Viswanath, a partner at Coatue.
Coatue has a history of making investments in open-source AI startups, including Stability AI, Hugging Face, and Replit.
Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
Credit: The Star : Tech Feed
