Former Google researchers Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, who co-authored the "Attention Is All You Need" paper that set the stage for generative AI, have raised $8M for their AI startup, according to Reuters.
Essential AI is reportedly building software for large businesses to utilize large language models.
- Thrive Capital led the round, with participation from Conviction and angel investor Elad Gil.
- According to Reuters, Essential AI remains in stealth mode and has not introduced any product.
- The startup's funders, Vaswani and Parmar, are former Google Brain researchers who are the first and third co-authors of the paper that introduced the deep learning model known as the Transformer.
- Vaswani and Parmar recently left another AI startup they co-founded, Adept AI, to launch Essential AI.
- Adept AI, which is developing AI models that perform tasks from text commands, recently raised $350M in a Series B funding round, giving it a post-money valuation of at least $1B.
- Adept was founded by CEO David Luan, a former Google Research director and former VP and director of engineering at OpenAI.
