The artificial intelligence industry has been increasingly dominated by large corporations like Microsoft and Google. That makes it tough for smaller outfits to compete, especially when so much of A.I. relies on expensive graphics processing units, or GPUs, for computing power.
That access gap is where one company sees a market opportunity, and a chance to even the playing field. Hyperbolic is a platform that provides computing power to small A.I. companies by buying unused time on GPUs from data centers and individual machines, and selling that to developers. It just raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital and Variant, bringing their total raised to $20 million.
“You only use a Mac maybe eight hours a day. So, the rest, 16 hours, you just let it sit idle,” CEO and co-founder of Hyperbolic Jasper Zhang told Fortune. “And if GPUs are such an important resource to power A.I. development, then why don’t we better utilize it and build a more sustainable ecosystem?”
Zhang, a 29-year old math Ph.D, and Yuchen Jin, an A.I. researcher and engineer, co-founded Hyperbolic in 2022 after many of their friends were unable to access a sufficient number of GPUs to run their models. The San Francisco-based company also helps developers access open source large language models (LLMs) including Meta’s Llama, and is developing its own blockchain and native token expected to launch next year. The idea is that customers will use the token to rent GPUs, and users who supply their unused GPUs will get paid in the token.
Hyperbolic’s services are already being used by Hugging Face, Quora, Cornell University, UC Berkeley and others, according to the company. Zhang said he plans to use money from the new funding round to expand Hyperbolic’s payroll, building out the engineering, strategic and go-to-market teams.
“In the future, A.I. will be integrated with every system: transportation, finance, social media, robotics and even your brain,” Zhang said. “Such highly-important innovations should be owned by the human society, instead of controlled by a few centralized companies.”
