Essential AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google researchers, has secured a significant $56.5 million investment.
The tranche of fresh funding was led by March Capital, with big players such as Google, Nvidia, and AMD participating. Other companies to get involved were Franklin Venture Partners, KB Investment, and Thrive Capital.
San Francisco-based Essential AI is very much a fledgling company, but it is led by two experienced, competent people, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar.
The duo worked closely together at Google, where they co-authored a research paper proposing the Transformer architecture that set new standards for language understanding six years ago, making it a front-runner for the technology we see today in ChatGPT and other AI programs.
Vaswani and Parmar want to “deepen the partnership between humans and computers.”
As reported by Venture Beat, Vaswani and Parmar want to “deepen the partnership between humans and computers” with the end goal of producing ready-made AI solutions to drive and increase productivity within the workplace.
Despite landing the funding to propel the business forward, it is still not exactly clear as to what Essential intends to do, and where it wants to focus, but information on the company website suggests that it will look to produce complex analyses with dedicated AI products that will make data analysts up to 10 times faster and allow end-users the ability to have autonomy and able to make data-driven decisions.
Following the news of the investment in Essential AI, the press release that confirmed the Series A funding quoted Vaswani, CEO of Essential, on the people who are ready to drive the project forward:
“Niki and I are excited to build a world-class, multi-disciplinary team of engineers, researchers, designers, and sales and product experts ready to solve real-world AI challenges and create a massive new market opportunity,” he stated.
With the backing of Google and Nvidia, this venture from Essential AI is far from a gamble, but there is plenty of competition in their field at present so it will be interesting to see what develops as they aim to stand out from the crowd.
Featured Image Credit: Google DeepMind; Pexels
