Reka, an AI model startup, has secured $50 million in a new VC funding round.
Investors, including DST Global Partners and Snowflake, recognized the potential of Reka’s specialization in developing large AI models for enterprise clients.
Snowflake, one of the investors, also announced a partnership with Reka, enabling users to run third-party model providers like Reka within their Snowflake account.
Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake’s senior vice president of product, emphasized the broader opportunity of integrating smaller, customized models into Snowflake, ensuring data privacy guarantees for customers utilizing these models. Snowflake additionally revealed a collaboration with Nvidia, granting enterprises access to Nvidia’s software stack for AI model development.
These partnerships emerged amid intense competition in the industry, as Snowflake’s rival, Databricks, acquired MosacicML, an AI model training company, in a significant $1.3 billion deal.
Reka plans to allocate the funding towards acquiring computing power from Nvidia and establishing a dedicated business team, according to CEO Dani Yogatama. Amidst a crowded market for large language models in enterprise applications, companies are striving to adopt AI systems like ChatGPT to enhance operational efficiency within corporate settings.
Reka distinguishes itself by not only building substantial models but also employing proprietary model distillation technology to personalize models for specific use cases. Their models support text, image, video, and structured data.
