Korean large-scale AI startup FriendliAI raises 8 billion KRW (~6.8 million USD) in Series A funding round

FriendliAI CEO Byung-Gon Chun disclosed on Wednesday that the large-scale AI development platform has raised 8 billion KRW in a Series A round funded by joint investors Capstone Partners, KB Investment, and KB Securities.

FriendliAI will continue to develop their AI platform and plans to release PeriFlow, a service that uses cloud computing to train and use custom large-scale AI models for consumers in a variety of industries.?

Since large-scale AI models have a huge number of tunable parameters, they must be trained on big computing infrastructures capable of handling heavy computations and massive datasets. By implementing their AI platform on the cloud, FriendliAI is able to develop and provide large-scale AI models at reduced costs.

FriendliAI’s PeriFlow platform incorporates unrivaled model learning and inference technology to provide impressively performant AI models, all the while dramatically reducing the cloud costs of development. PeriFlow’s inference services also help customers efficiently utilize their trained AI models, making AI effortless for its clients.

CEO Chun has pursued large-scale machine learning system research since the late 2000s. Chun is a renowned professor at Seoul National University. Chun has previously conducted ML research at Intel, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook. His technological prowess is globally recognized, most recently through his Hall of Fame Award from ACM SIGOPS and his EuroSys Test of Time Award, which recognizes the most influential systems papers over the past ten years.

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