Anna Patterson has a renowned career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engines Upstarts Xift and CUIL, as well as Recall.Archive.org, and became an Internet archive. She was Google's vice president of engineering and later launched Gradient Ventures, a seed fund focused on AI. And she's not finished with the building.
Patterson told TechCrunch that she had itching to start something new again a few years ago, but she wasn't sure if there was another startup. However, after losing her breast cancer diagnosis and many jobs that year in 2023, she realized she could either go back to her old life or start something new.
It is clear that she chose the latter. Her new startup, Ceramic.ai, says it will provide a basic AI training infrastructure that companies can use to train large language models faster, using fewer GPUs than “current cutting edge.” Ceramic claims that its models can work with clusters using long contexts, and its goal is to help the model grow by 100 times.
Patterson said he got the company's idea when he realized that the existing infrastructure for building LLM was too variable and too complicated for recruiting on a scale.
“Whenever you try to grow your infrastructure ten times, it's usually fine,” Patterson said. “But when you're trying to stretch it, you know, over a hundred times, you often need to take a step back and rethink it. So I thought to myself, if this is the infrastructure we'll be running for the next 10 years, is this the way I do it?”
Anna Patterson.ImageCredit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images from TechCrunch
That thought process culminated in January 2024 with Ceramic AI, and Patterson founded it with Tom Costello, the company's chief scientist. The startup has since operated on Stealth, and has already signed partners such as AWS and Lambda, but has not yet made any profits. Patterson wants to build trust, awareness and trust with potential customers before focusing on sales.
The company recently raised a $12 million seed round led by NEA and saw participation from IBM, Samsung Next, and Earthshot Ventures. Patterson said the NEA is a natural choice to lead the round due to the company's technical capabilities. Funds are primarily directed towards sales and ongoing development.
But what's different this time after three startups, senior career roles and years as an investor? Patterson says her approach to building a startup has changed since she spent time on the other side of the table as a VC investor. She feels she is now under more time pressure than when she built her first few companies.
“I felt this when I was a young building company. This means it's a bit sad, but I felt like running a meaningless company, like this was a really relaxed time,” she said. “Now, after years of being a VC, you know, but I definitely feel more pressure on me.”
She thinks that's a good thing, but she says it's better to put your product in front of customers faster and get feedback and iterate.
It could be suitable for ceramics as it is not the only company trying to help businesses expand their underlying models.
One of our biggest competitors is AI together. It helps businesses “turbocharge” their model building efforts and raises more than $530 million from venture capital. MOSIACML also targeted the acceleration of the LLM building, raising $37 million before being acquired by Databricks in 2023 for $1.3 billion.
For now, ceramics are cutting out the work if you want to carve out space for yourself in this fast mobile market.