AI startup Adaptive ML has secured a $20 million seed funding round to develop bespoke generative AI models for businesses, confirming earlier reports by Sifted.
Index Ventures spearheaded the funding round, joined by US investor ICONIQ, European family office Motier Ventures, VC IRIS, entrepreneur Xavier Niel, and HuggingFund by Factorial, the brainchild of Hugging Face founder Clément Delangue and Factorial VC Matt Hartman.
The company achieved a valuation of $100 million, according to The Information. Notably, Adaptive did not respond to Sifted’s request for comments.
Adaptive ML’s founding members comprise engineers and researchers from the European-originated open-source AI platform Hugging Face, including CEO Julien Launay, Daniel Hesslow, Alessandro Cappelli, Guilherme Penedo, and Olivier Cruchant, formerly of Amazon Web Services’ machine learning team.
This team boasts expertise in crafting popular open-source AI models like Falcon and Bloom.
What is Adaptive ML’s Core Function?
Adaptive ML aims to assist companies in leveraging open-source generative AI models, such as Meta’s Llama or Mistral’s 7B, to develop tailored tools suited to their specific requirements.
While some investors and entrepreneurs are banking on the potential of generative AI models—trained on extensive datasets to generate text or images—to significantly enhance business productivity, Adaptive contends that current systems are too generic and not tailored to enterprises’ distinct needs.
Customizing an open-source model for a particular application is a laborious, resource-intensive, and highly specialized endeavor.
Consequently, Adaptive intends to create personalized models for its clients and continually enhance these models post-deployment by integrating user feedback. This approach enables the model to learn from each human interaction, particularly beneficial for applications like customer support or R&D assistants.
Launay, in the fundraising announcement, stated, “We are simplifying the journey towards more intuitive, engaging genAI applications, thereby instantly enhancing user experience and business outcomes.” He added, “In the long run, we envision adaptive models absorbing every conversation to deliver unique user experiences.”
Per Sifted’s review of Adaptive’s pitch deck, the company anticipates charging clients \(120k-360k in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for ongoing platform usage and up to approximately \)1 million for bespoke models under “one-off revenue.”
A Transatlantic Venture
Despite being headquartered in New York, Adaptive ML’s primary engineering team is situated in Paris. The company plans to allocate a portion of the raised funds to establish an R&D center in Paris under the leadership of CTO Baptiste Pannier.
Over the next few months, the R&D team aims to recruit several dozen individuals to bolster its ranks.
