Somerville startup Neural Magic, an artificial-intelligence company trying to replace machine-learning hardware with software, has raised $30 million in Series A venture capital.
The funding round is the company’s largest to date and brings Neural Magic's total amount raised to $50 million.
Neural Magic’s business strategy is two-pronged, said CEO Brian Stevens in an interview. First, the company is giving AI developers and machine-learning engineers free tools to help them build optimized AI models. The company hopes to draw hundreds of thousands of developers to its tools and eventually commercialize its software engine in a subscription model, the second prong of the strategy.
“The phase we’re at is building a large community,” said Stevens, who is a former chief technology officer of Google Cloud.
Running the kind of models that Neural Magic is helping developers build usually requires specialty hardware.
“Others are building hardware to make AI run really fast. We figured out how to do that in a software environment,” Stevens said. “It’s really liberating and frictionless for developers and IT organizations.”
Neural Magic currently has 26 employees, most of whom are engineers, and it’s going to continue investing primarily in engineering over the next year, Stevens said.
The company also announced this week that Greg Papadopoulos of NEA, which led this round and was an initial investor in the company, is joining its board. He's already been closely involved for the past year, coming to all of the company's board meetings, Steven said.
The startup is still embroiled in a trade secrets battle with Facebook after suing the social media giant in 2020, alleging that a former employee who decamped for Facebook misappropriated algorithms developed at Neural Magic. That suit is still winding its way through the court, said Stevens.
