Flower Labs, a Hamburg-based startup pioneering in federated and decentralized AI, has successfully closed a $20 million (approximately €18.56M) Series A funding round. The investment is aimed at promoting the widespread adoption of federated learning, offering an alternative to traditional GPU-centric AI training methods by providing flexibility with training data and reducing GPU dependency.
The funding round was led by Felicis, with participation from First Spark Ventures, Factorial Capital, Beta Works, Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, and Mozilla Ventures. Notable angel investors, including Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue and GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon, also contributed, aligning with Flower Labs’ mission to build and support open-source community initiatives.
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Revolutionizing AI with Federated Learning
Niki Pezeshki, General Partner at Felicis, highlighted Flower Labs‘ innovative approach to federated machine learning, which aims to make model training more secure, safer, and enterprise-friendly. “Top universities and multinational companies already use Flower’s open-source technology, and the team is committed to making federated learning accessible and efficient for a wide range of users and applications,” Pezeshki stated.
Utilizing Capital for Open-Source Framework Enhancement
Flower Labs plans to use the funds to enhance its open-source framework, simplifying federated AI solutions. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI, Flower’s FedGPT technology enables solutions for a broader range of use cases. The increased investment will expedite its deployment.
Challenging Centralized AI Training Standards
Flower Labs is on a mission to revolutionize AI model training and usage by advocating for decentralized alternatives like federated learning. This approach ensures data privacy by keeping data at its source and only transferring computation results. Fortune 500 companies, including Samsung and Nokia Bell Labs, as well as innovators like Brave and Banking Circle, are early adopters of the Flower framework.
Building a Community Around Decentralized AI
The Flower framework boasts over 1000 open-source projects, collaborations with industry leaders like Intel, and a community of 3000 developers. Renowned universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Harvard contribute to the platform. The Flower Summer of Reproducibility initiative and the annual Flower AI Summit in London further strengthen the community by discussing advancements in decentralized AI.
With this Series A funding, Flower Labs is set to further its vision of a decentralized AI future, making federated learning more accessible and efficient for a wide array of applications, and playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI.
