Fastino, a pioneering AI startup based in Palo Alto, has successfully secured $17.5 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. This funding represents the company’s series A round, as the company has now raised just under $25 million in total. The latest investment follows an earlier pre-seed round where Fastino garnered $7 million from Microsoft’s venture capital arm, M12, and Insight Partners.
Ash Lewis is the founder of Fastino and now its CEO. The newest model they’ve developed, as well as the architecture behind it, is completely different, specifically by being small by design and task-focused. This approach stands in marked distinction to the practices of some of the technology behemoths. Their solution has been to churn out ever-larger trillion-parameter behemoths that are only trainable at the moment on huge, costly GPU superclusters. Fastino’s models use the lowest-end gaming graphics cards, which keeps the cost under $100,000. Even with this relatively inexpensive outlay, they do it with remarkable performance.
Fastino’s proprietary technology identifies processes for quick, stable responses, including the ability to return full answers in as little as one token. Ash Lewis demonstrated this layer of capacity, highlighting the efficiency and effectiveness of their predictive models. He stated, “Our models are faster, more accurate, and cost a fraction to train while outperforming flagship models on specific tasks.”
The company aspires to assemble a world-class AI team that pushes the boundaries of traditional approaches to language model development. Lewis explained that their hiring strategy has focused on bringing in researchers with a contrarian approach to current practice. “Our hiring strategy is very much focused on researchers that maybe have a contrarian thought process to how language models are being built right now,” he remarked.
Beyond their technological advancements, Fastino’s fact-finding forces have resulted in powerful tech industry accountability measures. The company’s team has played a pivotal role in instigating U.S. government sanctions against four technology companies, including China’s largest AI firm.
Notably, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and early backers of OpenAI, led the $20M seed round. His involvement is a testament to the promise that Fastino has to truly transform the AI landscape with its unique, fresh, and impactful approach.
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