When developers have a specific job that AI can solve, it's usually not as simple as just pointing LLM to the data. There are other considerations such as cost, speed, and accuracy, and finding a way to balance all of these can be especially difficult, especially since so many new models are coming online all the time.
That's where Unify, a British startup founded by Imperial College graduates, comes in. The company has come up with a router tool that allows developers to input parameters and find the best LLM for any unique requirements. The company announced an $8 million investment Wednesday.
“Unify's main goal is to help you decide which model from which provider is best suited for your task, using objective benchmarks and a dashboard that allows you to compare them,” says the company's founder and CEO. Daniel Renton told TechCrunch.
“Routers are effectively kind of a natural extension of this process, especially as enterprises start to deploy at scale and speed and cost become more critical. So what we're really trying to do is give users more control over the quality, cost and speed profile of their LLM applications,” said Renton.
Unsurprisingly, Unify uses AI to run its core router application. “Our router itself is a trained neural network, so it learns which models are best suited to perform which tasks,” he said. The company accomplishes this by running thorough benchmarks on each new model for all of these tasks, using GPT Pro as the judge. This allows the system to learn how well this model performed a particular task across the training set.
“So basically within a day or two, routers support new model providers very quickly,” he said.
Renton says that the router, and the way he builds his own models to train it, is itself a way to protect his startup's efforts from encroachment by larger companies, which are neutral while hyper- Scaler says that may not be the case.
He said customers typically just try out different models and don't have the tools to track which one is best.
“Some people with very serious problems want to try existing solutions. I think that's how we were able to get a foothold.” he said.
While there are competitors such as Martian Router, OpenRouter, and Portkey, Renton says they are the only company that jointly optimizes quality, cost, and speed.
The company is small at seven employees now, but he's intentionally keeping it lean while he works to bring a fully monetized product to market, and he plans to add three more employees this year.
He reports that he has several hundred regular users and about 3,000 sign-ups so far. They hope to make money by charging companies a fee to build their own custom benchmarks. Each company can start using this tool with a $50 credit.
The $8 million investment came from a number of investors including SignalFire, M12, J12, Essence VC, and A. Capital. Lunar VC, Y Combinator, and many prominent industry angels.