Reka AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research/product development company, has raised $110 million.
The company’s new funding round, announced Tuesday (July 22), includes donations from NVIDIA and Data Cloud Company Snowflake, which will help Reka expand its multimodal platform and promote corporate adoption.
“Reka is known for its ultra-efficient multimodal model developed by a world-class research team,” the company said in a news release.
“The company is focused on efficient training and servicing infrastructure, allowing it to develop a market-leading model at a fraction of the cost. RekaFlash is a multimodal model that understands video, images, text and audio.
A report from Bloomberg News shows that Round Value Leka is $1 billion. The same report notes that Snowflake had talks last year to acquire Reka, but those discussions ended when CEO Daniyogatama told Bloomberg.
Vivek Raghunathan, Vice President of AI Engineering at Snowflake, said the company will provide its clients with models of Reka AI and other tools.
“Most teams in the world have the ability to build what they’ve built,” Lagunathan said. “Almost every person with that level of talent is in Openai, Meta or humanity. Rekha is one of the rare independents and it proves they can compete.”
Earlier this year, Snowflake announced plans for a new Silicon Valley AI Hub, its goals, and investments of up to $200 million in early-stage startups, along with startup accelerators and venture capital partners.
In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the use of AI benchmarks achieved whenever companies like Google and OpenAI deploy new models.
“The first path to identification is to understand the nature of these benchmarks,” the report states. “These benchmarks are standardized tests that measure proficiency in AI models in several areas, including mathematics, science, language understanding, coding, and inference.”
Without benchmarks, companies should rely on marketing billing or one-sided case studies to figure out which AI systems to use.
“Benchmark Orient AI,” said Percy Lean, director of the Stanford University Foundation Model Research Center, at the 2023 Fellow Fund event. “They give the community a North Star.”
