Anari AI was founded in early 2020 to “deliver a new way of designing and using AI chips through programming in the cloud.” The company has raised $2 million in seed funding led by Earlybird, with participation from Acequia Capital, Serbian Entrepreneurs, and Eric Ries, author and founder of The Lean Startup. The company plans to seek a much bigger funding round towards the end of this year.

Co-founder and CEO Jovan Stojanovic is the founder of the Wonderland AI community of roughly 30,000 people. Wonderland AI is associated with 5 entities and has about 70 employees. Anari AI has roughly 20 employees comprised of a full team of Ph.Ds in Serbia along with an office in San Francisco.

With AI model complexity doubling every 3.5 months, Anari believes the current way of building AI infrastructure is not sustainable. Anari’s platform makes it possible to design personalized AI “chips” in the cloud with “just one click”. With this approach, companies can build and deploy AI solutions in weeks instead of 12-18 months, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional hardware development.

The platform is built on a Python-based programming framework developed by Anari for chip design. Essentially, Anari AI has developed a framework and toolchain for compiling AI models onto FPGAs in the cloud, meaning AWS.

The first configurable AI cloud chip from Anari is Thor X, which delivers 100x more efficient processing of 3D Point Cloud/Graph data structures compared to a high-end GPU, according to the company. Thor X will be available in June and is targeted at gaming and genomics. The company is engaged with customers in these sectors. Semantic segmentation is also a target.

The new funding will be used to continue developing the platform and bring it to market. The Anari platform for cloud chips can be used by companies across industries such as gaming, automotive and biotechnology to personalize their AI infrastructure.

Jovan Stojanovic, co-founder and CEO (founder of the Wonderland AI community)

Stefan Sredojevic, co-founder and COO (Co-Founder of Serbian AI Society and Wonderland AI Summit)

Bogdan Vukobratovic, Ph.D., co-founder and Head of R&D (Senior HW developer at Sprinting Software and Senior Director R&D at Kortiq)

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