AI startup Nomic has raised $17 million in a new funding round from investors led by Coatue, the companies told Reuters.
The investment valued NewYork-based Nomic AI, a team of four at the time, at $100 million, showing VCs’ continued interest in backing startups with small teams developing successful AI products. Betaworks Ventures and Contrary Capital also participated in the round.
Since its inception in 2022, Nomic has released two products, one of which is GPT4ALL, an open-source AI model that can be downloaded for free and run on computers, including laptops. It also has a tool called Atlas that enables users to visualize unstructured datasets used to build large language models (LLM).
According to Nomic, its goals are to democratize access to AI models and improve the visibility of datasets in model training.
“We want to allow people to have access to the most powerful models that are specialized for the use cases they care about and to build those systems themselves. They need to be able to understand what data goes into those systems,” said Andriy Mulyar, co-founder at Nomic AI, who plans to use the funding for hiring and product development.
More than 50,000 developers from companies, including Hugging Face, according to Nomic, have used its products. Furthermore, it has partnerships with Replit and MongoDB. As researchers worldwide collaborate to develop models that could compete with GPT-4, open-source models are considered alternatives to proprietary models developed by AI labs like OpenAI and Google.
“It gives you the platform for privacy with a local model, which will become more important as people have unique data that they want to interact with LLM,” said Sri Viswanath, partner at Coatue. Coatue has invested in open-source AI startups, including Stability AI, Hugging Face, and Replit.
