Spell Raises $15 Million to Make AI Hardware Accessible to All Developers
Former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino secures $15 million in Series A funding for Spell, a collaborative platform that provides easy access to powerful cloud GPUs for machine learning experiments.
Former Facebook AI Research director Serkan Piantino launches Spell to solve a major barrier in the artificial intelligence industry. He recognizes that developers outside of massive tech companies struggle to access the expensive hardware required to run machine learning experiments. To address this problem, Piantino creates a collaborative platform that connects users directly to the newest GPUs hosted by major cloud providers like Google, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
Spell raises $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Eclipse Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures to expand this vision. The platform operates much like early mainframe systems, allowing users to log into a shared, highly powerful remote infrastructure. During a recent demonstration, a standard laptop takes significantly longer to process a basic image detection test compared to Spell's cloud computing platform, which completes the same task in under a minute.
The service offers distinct advantages for different types of users by eliminating the need to physically build expensive computers. Individual developers use the platform for free by simply specifying their required GPU type, while corporate teams utilize built-in tools to view, compare, and collaborate on experiments. Enterprise clients also have the option to set up private clusters to keep their proprietary machine learning programs completely secure.