EdgeRunner AI, a new San Francisco based startup building Gen AI for the edge, has officially launched – closing a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Four Rivers Group with participation from Madrona Ventures and strategic angels.
The funding will go towards building EdgeRunner AI’s innovative platform, powered by state-of-the-art transparent models designed to operate seamlessly on any device or hardware without requiring internet access. This technology is pitched as transforming how enterprises and organizations responsibly deploy Gen AI – providing them with hyper-personalization and domain specific use cases.
By developing small, task-specific open models optimized for any chip, EdgeRunner AI elevates SLMs into Ultra-Efficient Language Models (UELMs). This allows organizations to run AI models locally on any device or hardware, resulting in improved performance, increased data privacy, near zero latency and reduced power consumption for a better, more sustainable future.
“The challenge with Generative AI today lies in its broad applicability without addressing specific business needs,” said Tyler Xuan Saltsman, Co-Founder and CEO, EdgeRunner AI.
“From my military experience in Eastern Europe, I saw the need for personalized, domain specific and secure AI in isolated environments.
Black box proprietary models are aligned to the cloud rather than the user. Understanding the biases within these opaque models is complex and critical for both usability and safety.
Our approach ensures full transparency of models from weights and code to architecture and datasets.”
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