Alembic Technologies raises $145M and buys an Nvidia-powered supercomputer to speed up ‘causal AI’

Causal artificial intelligence startup Alembic Technologies Inc. said today it has raised $145 million in a Series B growth round that increases its valuation almost 16-fold.

It’s using a giant chunk of those funds to take a position in what it says is certainly one of the fastest privately owned supercomputers ever built – a brand new Nvidia Corp. NVL72 superPOD that’ll function the inspiration of its enterprise-grade AI models.

Alembic claims to be a pioneer of enterprise-focused causal AI models that give attention to generating marketing intelligence. Causal AI models are designed to grasp and model cause-and-effect relationships, as opposed to only identifying patterns and correlations. Alembic said it’s leveraging causal AI to generate richer insights into the underlying aspects behind certain consumer behaviors and events, so it may enhance its customers’ decision-making.

In other words, Alembic is attempting to develop more reliable AI models that may safely be utilized in enterprise environments, and to do this it must leverage its customers’ all-important private data. The startup said its Causal Engine acts like a personal intelligence layer for AI models and creates a compounding flywheel. By surfacing higher insights, corporations can create superior products and methods for his or her customers, which then help to capture more, potentially even richer data, allowing further insights to be generated.

Alembic co-founder and Chief Executive Tomás Puig said there’s really not much difference amongst probably the most powerful large language models today by way of their performance or capabilities. It’s the proprietary data those models can access that gives the primary competitive advantage. “Getting an actual edge isn’t about using one of the best LLM,” he explained. “It’s about leveraging the unique information your rivals can’t access. The exclusive data an organization generates protects its strategy from generic model outputs, where two competitors could get the identical answers.”

Strategic bet on private AI infrastructure

The dimensions of today’s round indicates that Alembic’s latest supercomputer doesn’t come low-cost, but Puig stressed that it’s a significant investment for the corporate. It’s planning to deploy the NVL72 superPOD, which is supplied with Nvidia’s strongest Blackwell graphics processing units, in an enormous DGX AI supercomputing cluster in partnership with the information center colocation provider Equinix Inc. The cluster will run the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite to supply a “high-performance computing backbone” for its causal AI models.

Puig said the system has been customized to run its continuous-learning spiking neural networks and spatio-temporal graph construction algorithms, enabling it to scale to support its growing customer base and proceed generating fresh causal insights in real time. It’s notable that that is the second supercomputing cluster Alembic has acquired, as a part of its strategic focus to make sure bicoastal redundancy and avoid being locked in to any cloud vendors. By investing in a dedicated, private AI fleet, Alembic advantages from guaranteed resource availability and gains the power to raised optimize its stack for causal AI workloads.

In response to Puig, Alembic needs access to the world’s most advanced and capable computing platforms with a view to give you the option to advance casual AI further. “[NVL72] allows our research teams to completely leverage multi-exaflop-level compute and Nvidia’s algorithmic software stack,” he explained. “This deep integration is certainly one of our secret weapons – we spend more time on breakthrough research and arithmetic and fewer time on repetitive low-level engineering, enabling us to deliver Causal answers to partners like Accenture in near real-time.”

Today’s round was co-led by Prysm Capital and Accenture Plc, and saw participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, NextEquity, Friends & Family Capital, WndrCo and SLW.

Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet said causal AI is critical for enterprise adoption of AI, because regulated corporations need each high performance and extreme reliability. “Alembic’s Causal AI provides exactly that by moving the enterprise beyond correlation to deliver the verifiable, cause-and-effect insights leaders must act with decisive speed,” she said.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Meta AI