U.S. startup Arsi AI, which develops open-weight AI models, has raised Series B funding after being valued at about $1 billion, SiliconANGLE reported on Sept. 17 local time.
The funding amount was not disclosed, but Fortune said the round was worth at least $150 million.
Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Emergence Capital led the investment. A10 Ventures, Hitachi, IAG, Microsoft M12, P7 and Wipro also participated.
Arsi AI co-founder and Chief Executive Mark McQuade (맥크쿼드) says companies should have more control over the AI systems they use.
Many U.S. AI developers focus on closed approaches that keep model-based code private and directly control the execution environment, but Arsi AI is moving in the opposite direction. McQuade said the goal is to catch up with Chinese AI companies in the open-weight market.
ㆍOpen-weight AI companies are emerging in the United States... but whether it can check China is 'unclear'
Arsi AI's flagship models are the Trinity series, released last year. Trinity Large has 400 billion parameters, with 13 billion active parameters per token. Arsi AI plans to use the newly raised funds to train the next-generation open-weight Trinity model.
Chi-gyu Hwang
delight@d-today.co.kr