Fastino, a Palo Alto-based startup, has recently and quietly raised $17.5 million in seed funding, with Khosla Ventures leading the round. This follows a pre-seed round last November, marking Fastino’s second investment. During that series D round, they raised a whopping $7 million from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, M12, and Insight Partners. With this latest round of company funding now comes to almost $25 million.
Fastino is an expert at designing next-generation AI models that return the most advanced answer possible in just one token. By using this innovative technology, we are able to get comprehensive answers in a matter of milliseconds—a huge improvement in efficiency over traditional models. The company’s system employs low-cost gaming GPUs, with equipment totaling less than $100k. These consumer GPUs are able to train its small, task-specific AI architectures very effectively.
The startup’s approach stands in stark contrast to many tech giants that often promote massive trillion-parameter models requiring extensive and costly GPU clusters. Speed has been their goal since the beginning — as much or more than accuracy — in order to have models that are cheap to train.
Ash Lewis, the CEO and co-founder of Fastino, highlights the benefits of their generative models. He stated,
“Our models are faster, more accurate, and cost a fraction to train while outperforming flagship models on specific tasks.”
This quest for efficiency aligns perfectly with the current generative AI enterprise wave. Consequently, an increasing share of companies are turning to smaller, more specialized language models.
Fastino’s dedication to innovation goes beyond just inspiring their work culture. Lewis mentioned that the company is looking for researchers who have a contrarian viewpoint in developing today’s language model systems. He noted,
“Our hiring strategy is very much focused on researchers that maybe have a contrarian thought process to how language models are being built right now.”
Fastino has completed impressive technological achievements. They’ve reported to the U.S. Senate investigative reporting that led the U.S. government to sanction four foreign tech companies, including China’s largest AI firm, Megvii. This illustrates the company’s influence not just over the tech world but over ongoing regulatory efforts to tame AI.
Fastino has significant momentum and is creating state-of-the-art, proprietary AI technology. It seeks to establish a unique position focused on responsible and collaborative AI in the crowded marketplace of generative AI. That recent funding will go a long way toward helping it ignite its mission to innovate and grow its team of high-tech, creative talent.