According to four sources speaking to Reuters, two well-known former Google (GOOGL.O) researchers who wrote the seminal paper that launched the generative AI boom have raised $8 million for their new company, Essential AI.
Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, the founders of Essential AI, had Thrive Capital lead the round. The business hasn’t released any products and is still operating in secret. Elad Gil, an angel investor and member of Conviction, also invested in the round, according to a source close to the business.
Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, is also an investor in Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Essential AI aims to build software for enterprises to use large language models, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system that has powered generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, sources said.
Thrive Capital declined to comment. Vaswani and Parmar didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
The raise came after Vaswani and Parmar left Adept AI, a company they also co-founded in 2021 with former Google director David Luan. Adept, focused on training a neural network to perform general tasks for enterprise clients, has raised $415 million from investors including General Catalyst. EssentialAI is not in direct competition with Adept, sources added.
Vaswani and Parmar are the first and third authors on Google’s 2017 research paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which introduced the “transformer” deep learning architecture that went on to become the basis for viral chatbot ChatGPT and the current race to develop products powered by generative AI.
The duo join other authors on the famous paper who have left Google (GOOGL.O) to start their own ventures and subsequently attracted millions in funding from venture investors, including Noam Shazeer, who is running AI chatbot startup Character.AI, and Aidan Gomez, who founded large language model startup Cohere.