Singaporean ex-Googler’s startup raises $58m for enterprise AI endeavor

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Reka, a company that creates generative AI models for various kinds of data, has secured US$58 million in a funding round led by DST Global and Radical Ventures.

Emerging out of stealth mode, Reka was established by former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta, who have contributed to technologies like Gopher, Bard, and AlphaCode.

“We have two key goals – to build amazing generative models and to push the frontiers of AI research,” Yi Tay, chief scientist and co-founder of Reka, said in a tweet. Yi Tay was formerly a senior research scientist at Google Brain. Before that, he earned his PhD from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

The company also launched a closed beta test of its first product, Yasa, an enterprise-grade multimodal assistant. It can process and produce text, images, videos, and tabular data, Reka told TechCrunch.

Yasa can help companies by generating ideas and extracting insights from their internal data, among other functions. This AI assistant can also be customized based on specific data and applications.

Reka also offers a service to adapt large language models it has created to custom or proprietary company datasets, it told the publication.

Snowflake, which also participated in this round, announced its partnership with Reka in a separate release. With this collaboration, Snowflake customers will gain access to Reka’s multimodal assistant. Snowflake offers a cloud-based platform that allows users to store and access structured, semistructured, and unstructured data in one location.

Some of Snowflake’s clients include industry majors like AT&T, Western Union, and Doordash.

See also: Exclusive insights from Tony Fadell on ChatGPT and the AI gold rush

Correction  (July 3, 11:00 a.m.): This article was updated to remove Baidu in the second paragraph highlighting the backgrounds of the Reka team.