TLDR:
- Substrate, an AI infrastructure startup based in NYC, has raised $8M in Seed funding.
- The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from other investors.
Substrate, a NYC-based AI infrastructure startup, has closed an $8M Seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other investors include South Park Commons, Craft Ventures, and individuals such as Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) and Will Gaybrick (Stripe). The company, led by CEO Rob Cheung, plans to use the funds to expand its market for inference solutions and bring modern AI capabilities to software engineers. Substrate provides an API for modular AI, allowing users to build fast multi-step AI programs using optimized models, colocated file and vector storage, a code interpreter, and logical control flow. The API harnesses curated open-source AI models across various modalities and optimizes them to run at scale. Substrate’s design allows multi-inference programs to run as quickly as possible, analyzing programs as a graph and optimizing for parallelism and throughput. Early customers of Substrate include Substack and Maven. With this funding, Substrate aims to continue developing its AI infrastructure offerings and reach a broader audience of software engineers looking to leverage AI in their applications.
