Lamini, a Palo Alto-based startup, has secured $25 million in funding to help enterprises deploy generative AI technology tailored to their specific needs. The round was led by Amplify Partners and First Round Capital, with participation from notable investors such as Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, and Bernard Arnault. With this funding, Lamini aims to provide enterprises with the tools to develop their own AI solutions, tailored to their specific needs.
The startup's pitch is compelling: enterprises have unique data and requirements that demand a tailored AI approach. Co-founders Sharon Zhou and Greg Diamos argue that many generative AI platforms are too general-purpose and lack the necessary solutions and infrastructure to meet the unique requirements of corporations. In contrast, Lamini's platform is built from the ground up with enterprises in mind, focusing on delivering high accuracy and scalability.
"We believe there's a massive opportunity for generative AI in enterprises," said Mike Dauber, General Partner at Amplify Partners. "Lamini is the first one I've seen that is taking the problems of the enterprise seriously and creating a solution that helps enterprises unlock the tremendous value of their private data while satisfying even the most stringent compliance and security requirements."
Lamini's approach, termed "Expert AI," is designed to leverage proprietary data within a proprietary ecosystem, differing from "General AI" that relies on public data for public use. By tapping into the vast untouched data within enterprises, Lamini enables deeper capabilities that go beyond simple reasoning, coding, and question answering.
Since its launch in April 2023, Lamini has achieved significant milestones, including the development of an LLM Photographic Memory Evaluation Suite, multi-node LLM training, guaranteed JSON output, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). The company has also partnered with industry leaders such as AMD, Snowflake, Databricks, and Meta.
The new funding will accelerate Lamini's development of deeper technical optimizations and expand its team to provide strategic support to enterprises at scale. The company is also proactively expanding its global GPU cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from customers across new regions.
"Many founders these days are newcomers to generative AI and LLMs — but not Sharon and Greg," said Todd Jackson, Partner at First Round Capital. "They've been working on this technology for over a decade and are world-class experts in AI and high-performance machine learning systems. That knowledge combined with a deeply customer-centric approach to solving problems for big enterprises creates a massive advantage for their customers."
As enterprises seek to capitalize on the potential of generative AI, Lamini's platform aims to address common blockers such as model quality, infrastructure scalability, security, and ROI. By providing a tailored solution that prioritizes accuracy, flexibility, and enterprise-grade deployments, Lamini is poised to help corporations unlock the full potential of their proprietary data and expertise through generative AI.