AI optimisation startup Inephany has raised £1.8m in a pre-seed funding round to accelerate development of its AI-powered optimisation platform.
The platform is said to revolutionise how neural networks – including Large Language Models (LLMs) – are trained and fine-tuned.
Amadeus Capital Partners led the round, with participation from specialist AI VC Sure Valley Ventures and Professor Steve Young, who joins the London-based firm as both an angel investor and company chair.
The funding will also be used to grow the core engineering team, advance its optimisation platform, and onboard its first enterprise customers.
“We are thrilled to be backed by such experienced investors, and having a seasoned entrepreneur and AI pioneer like Professor Steve Young as our chair is a true privilege,” said John Torr, CEO at Inephany.
“Current approaches to training LLMs and other neural networks are extremely wasteful across multiple dimensions. Our unique solution tackles this inefficiency head-on, with the potential to radically reduce both the cost and time required to train and optimise state-of-the-art models.
“As we prepare to deliver our first products later this year, we are incredibly excited to embark on the next chapter of our journey—and to help shape the ongoing AI revolution by transforming AI optimisation.”
Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, added: “We very much look forward to backing John, Hami, and Maurice as they tackle key efficiency challenges in current AI training.
“Their innovative approach to automating and optimising neural network training has the potential to reduce costs by an order of magnitude and accelerate advancements across AI applications.
“If rolled out at scale, the impact of this on what models can deliver will be very substantial.”