Today, we are emerging from stealth and announcing our $5.5M seed fundraising round led by Four Rivers Group with participation from Madrona Ventures and strategic angels.

Less than two years ago, ChatGPT was released, introducing not just the tech world but also enterprises more broadly to the power of Generative AI. Every enterprise and organization started looking deeply at how this technology could improve operations and accelerate outcomes while being responsibly implemented and personalized for their use cases.

Since then, one of the main stumbling blocks to adoption for organizations has been how to efficiently integrate and deploy this technology safely and securely while minimizing hallucinations and without compromising sensitive private data.

While most attention thus far has been on large frontier models that boast hundreds of billions – if not trillions – of parameters, these general-purpose models have many drawbacks and are not ideal for solving specific problems.

The majority of data is created and stored at the edge, either on-device locally or on-premise. Machines, sensors, and other IoT devices generate vast amounts of data, which requires local processing using smaller models to create intelligence at the source with near zero latency.

Moreover, organizations possess substantial IP-rich private data that must remain protected. These organizations need the capability to deploy practical foundation models directly at the source, whether on-device or at the server level.

If enterprises and governments could bring transparent, open models to their data rather than having to send their data to the cloud, they would be able to both own their AI and safely reap the benefits of Generative AI.

We founded EdgeRunner AI with this mission in mind: building Generative AI for the edge that is safe, secure, and transparent.

We are constructing an ensemble of small, task-specific models that work synergistically to solve complex problems at the edge where data is created and resides. Think of this as swarm intelligence, with many models working together in real time at once.

Our AI will also be open and transparent for our customers, from the code to our datasets to our model weights and architectures for needed explainability.

We will focus on heavily regulated industries that must understand "how the sausage is made" to use AI safely and responsibly. Notably, we’ll work in lockstep with our defense sector partners to bring the latest AI capabilities to our Warfighters.

The market for Generative AI at the edge is vast and we have ambitions to become the standard for running AI at the edge on any chip.

We are excited to welcome Dan Scholnick of Four Rivers Group to our board. Dan’s experience as a founder and early investor in some of the most successful open-source companies, including Weights & Biases, New Relic, Docker, and more, has already been invaluable.

We’re also thrilled to have participation from Madrona Ventures, an early investor in Amazon and Snowflake, and other strategic angels.

Join our team if you’re passionate about bringing AI everywhere. We’re hiring for research and engineering positions. More details are here.