Lumino, an AI infrastructure startup, announced that it has raised a $2.8 million Pre-Seed financing round. This round’s investors include Longhash Ventures, Inception Ventures, Protocol Labs, TRGC, L2IV, Zero Knowledge Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Quaker Capital Investments, OrangeDAO, and Escape Velocity.
Training AI models requires large amounts of computing power, which has led to a price surge for GPUs. Additionally, large enterprises have reserved GPUs and have made it impossible for others to rent out GPUs. Finally, large public cloud providers are able to pick and choose who has the ability to build AI, potentially leading to censorship or concentrating power in the few.
Lumino was founded by Eshan Chordia and Yogesh Darji in July 2023 to fight all of these problems. Lumino is building an integrated hardware and software compute protocol for AI workloads. The protocol uses economic incentives to bring compute resources together, blockchain to ensure models are being trained correctly, and a SDK for developers to get started instantly. Customers can start training their AI models in minutes with the Lumino SDK, and they see AI compute costs decrease by up to 80% as compared to traditional cloud providers.
Eshan previously designed Filecoin cryptoeconomics at Protocol Labs, built the world’s most advanced AI-powered wildfire risk model at Zesty.ai, and founded Nootry, a mobile product to help people find healthy food at restaurants. Yogesh previously led infrastructure at TaxBit & Twilio to process billions of transactions per day. He also built large-scale distributed systems at AWS on the EC2 core platform team, and founded a carpooling app to help solve traffic problems in metropolitan cities.