Three months old GigaML raises $3.6M led by Nexus VP, YC, others

San Francisco and Bengaluru-based startup GigaML has raised $3.6 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners and saw participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Venture, 8vdx, and notable angel investors, including Garry Tan, the President and CEO of Y Combinator.

What are the offerings of GigaML?

Addressing the growing need for secure AI and Large Language Model (LLM) solutions in enterprises, GigaML said it facilitates the deployment of robust LLMs, akin to GPT-4, directly on enterprise servers. 

According to the startup, This eliminates the need to transmit sensitive data to external servers, such as those operated by OpenAI. GigaML's platform empowers businesses to further customize the base model to cater to their specific requirements, the release notes.

GigaML's X1 Large 32k model is a developed iteration of the llama2 70B 4k model. While other companies, including Mosaic ML and Together AI, have worked on fine-tuning the Llama 2 model, GigaML has reported progress in this area.

GigaML was founded three months ago by IIT Kharagpur graduates Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep Dinne.

What was the market's response to GigaML?

Since its public launch merely 15 days ago, GigaML claims to have garnered significant attention, with its website ranking as the fourth most visited among startups in Y Combinator's S23 batch. The platform has witnessed keen interest from sectors like healthcare, legal, and finance. 

The startup said the enterprises are exploring its offerings for diverse use cases, ranging from customer support to code generation for enhancing engineering team productivity. 

Varun Vummadi, one of the founders, said, "At Giga ML, our utmost priority is to ensure the privacy and security of enterprise data. Our goal is to position our company as the leading provider of On-Premise Secure LLMs."

What do investors say about GigaML?

"We are excited to partner with the Giga ML team in their journey to securely enable enterprise adoption of LLMs; we have been big believers in the open-source ecosystem, and we think this will play out equally or even more strongly in the case of LLMs and enterprise adoption. However, there are significant challenges today around the lack of tooling and know-how of internal teams to put these models in production in a secure way. Giga ML has taken up on the challenge to become the defacto platform for LLM deployments in enterprises." said Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners.

A look at Venture Partners and Y Combinator

Nexus Venture Partners, with over $2 billion under management, has a diverse portfolio that includes prominent names like Postman, Apollo.io, and Zomato. Earlier this year, the firm closed its Nexus Ventures VII fund at $700 million, aiming to support AI, SaaS, fintech, and commerce startups in both India and the US.

On the other hand, Y Combinator's focus on Indian startups seems to be waning, with the Y Combinator Summer 2023 batch witnessing the lowest participation by Indian startups since 2020.