Neocloud Prime Intellect Acquires Startup To Speed Up Inference

Neoclouds and so-called inference providers that help app developers run open source models are trying to differentiate themselves in a very crowded market. 

For instance, one such neocloud, Prime Intellect, which was valued at $1 billion in an equity financing in July, is buying a startup to help it make open models run faster and more cheaply on its Nvidia servers, compared to its rivals.  

Prime Intellect, based in San Francisco, is acquiring Moondream, a young developer of open-source models that has fewer than 10 employees, according to Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser. (Weisser wouldn’t share the terms of the deal, but Moondream has raised $4.5 million in funding.) 

San Francisco- and Seattle-based Moondream is best known for an open-source vision-language model for analyzing and understanding images, like identifying boxes in an image of a warehouse or ads in a livestream. But Prime Intellect is largely acquiring the startup for its employees’ skills in writing software to make models run more efficiently, Weisser said.