London-based TitanML, an AI company, announced on Thursday that it has secured $2.8M (approximately €2.6M) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Octopus Ventures along with deep tech-focused angel investors.
The funding comes as the UK company launches — Titan Takeoff, which makes large language model (LLM) deployment significantly faster, and cheaper for machine learning teams.
“We see so many businesses investing heavily in AI, but most struggle to return value from their investments. Machine learning teams are facing a whole host of problems in model deployment – from GPU shortages, to concerns over privacy when deploying through third parties like OpenAI. We’re transforming what was once the most challenging part of the development cycle into the easiest and most efficient, and it’s here where our flagship product, Takeoff, comes into its own”, says Meryem Arik, CEO & Co-Founder of TitanML.
The company is on a mission to build the infrastructure layer for deep learning in the enterprise.
TitanML: What you need to know
Founded in 2021, TitanML was born out of the postdoctoral research of Dr. James Dborin and Dr. Fergus Finn, who explored deep learning training, compression, and inference optimisation whilst at University College London (UCL).
They later joined forces with co-founder Meryem Arik, who was an Oxford alumna.
TitanML enables machine learning teams to effortlessly and efficiently deploy large language models (LLMs).
Currently, the team consists of expert ML researchers, engineers, and architects working to accelerate the adoption of deep learning in enterprises.
The investors
Octopus is a multi-stage venture capital investor specialising in B2B software, bio, climate, consumer, deep tech, fintech, health. Each year, the VC deploys more than £200M to help its portfolio companies scale at speed.
Mat Munro of the Deep Tech Team at Octopus Ventures says, “There’s a lot of excitement at the moment around new language models. For companies wanting to deploy these in-house however, the reality is that it can take months of work by highly skilled data scientists that still need to optimise these models to turn them into deployable products. TitanML makes it possible for businesses to significantly reduce the processing requirements of high specification models quickly, cheaply, and with minimal trade-offs, unlocking the true potential of these technologies.”
“We are very excited to be leading this round of investment and look forward to supporting the team as they take the next steps in empowering businesses with efficient model deployment,” he adds.
Read the orginal article: https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/uk-ai-startup-titanml-raises-2-6m/
