Anna Patterson's Ceramic.ai Aims to Revolutionize AI Model Building
- Ceramic.ai provides foundational AI training infrastructure for enterprises
- The company's model can use long contexts and work with any clusters
- Goal is to help models scale by 100 times
- Raised $12 million in seed funding led by NEA
- Partners include AWS and Lambda
- Competitors include Together AI and MosaicML
- Founder Anna Patterson has experience in Silicon Valley, including founding three startups and serving as VP of engineering at Google
Introduction to Ceramic.ai
Anna Patterson, a veteran of Silicon Valley, has founded her fourth startup, Ceramic.ai, which aims to help enterprises build AI models faster and more efficiently. Patterson's experience in the tech industry includes founding three startups, serving as the vice president of engineering at Google, and starting Gradient Ventures, an AI-focused seed fund.
Ceramic.ai provides foundational AI training infrastructure that enables enterprises to train large language models using fewer GPUs than current state-of-the-art methods. The company's model can use long contexts and work with any clusters, with the goal of helping models scale by 100 times.
The Idea Behind Ceramic.ai
Patterson got the idea for Ceramic.ai when she realized that existing infrastructure for building large language models (LLMs) had too many variables and was too complicated for enterprise adoption at scale. She thought about how she would design the infrastructure if she were to build it from scratch, considering it would be used for the next 10 years.
This thought process led to the founding of Ceramic.ai in January 2024, along with Tom Costello, the company's chief scientist. The startup has been operating in stealth mode since then and has already signed partners, including AWS and Lambda, although it is not yet generating revenue.
Funding and Partnerships
Ceramic.ai recently raised a $12 million seed round led by NEA, with participation from IBM, Samsung Next, and Earthshot Ventures. The funding will be used for sales and continued development. Patterson chose NEA to lead the round due to the firm's technical prowess.
The company's approach to building startups has changed since Patterson's experience as a VC investor. She now feels more time-pressured and believes it's better to get products in front of customers earlier to receive feedback and iterate.
Market Competition
Ceramic.ai is not the only company looking to help enterprises scale their foundational models. Competitors include Together AI, which has raised over $530 million in venture capital, and MosaicML, which was acquired by Databricks in 2023 for $1.3 billion. Ceramic.ai has its work cut out to carve out a place for itself in this fast-moving market.