Anna Patterson has a long career in Silicon Valley. She founded three startups, including search engine Upstarts XIFT and fuelalso remot.archive.orgthis became an Internet archive. She was once the vice president of engineering at Google and later started Gradient Ventures at the AI-centric seed fund. And she didn’t finish the building.
Patterson told TechCrunch that a few years ago she had itch to start something new again, but wasn’t sure she had another startup. But after her breast cancer diagnosis in 2023 and losing her job that year, she realized she could go back to her old life and start something new.
It’s obvious that she chose the latter: her new startup, ceramic.aisays it provides a basic AI training infrastructure where businesses can use fewer GPUs to train large language models faster, rather than “currently latest technologies.” Ceramics claims that its models can use longer contexts and work with any cluster, with the goal of helping the model scale 100 times.
Patterson said that when she realized there were too many variables in existing infrastructure to build LLMS, she had an idea about the company and was too complex for the scale of the business adoption.
“Whenever you try to stretch the infrastructure 10 times, it’s usually no problem,” Patterson said. “But when you try to stretch 100 times or more, you usually have to take a step back and rethink it. So, I think myself, if this is some infrastructure we’re going to run in the next 10 years, how do I do it?”
The thinking process peaked in ceramic AI in January 2024, which Patterson founded with the company’s chief scientist Tom Costello. The startup has been invisible since then and has signed up for partners including AWS and Lambda – although no revenue has been generated yet. Patterson said she wanted to build credibility, awareness and trust 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 that because of the company’s technical strength, NEA is a natural choice to lead the tour. The funds will be mainly used for sales and sustainable development.
But what is the difference this time after three startups, senior positions and years of career as an investor? Patterson said her approach to building startups has changed since she worked as a venture investor on the other end of the table. Compared to setting up the previous companies, she felt that her time was tight.
“I felt sad when I was a young construction company, but I felt it was really as easy as running an impartial project, sales-free company,” she said. “While now, you know I’m sure I feel more stressed after being a VC for years.”
She thinks it’s a good thing, saying it’s better to put your product in front of customers early and get feedback and iteration.
This may have something to do with ceramics, as it is not the only company looking to help businesses expand their underlying models.
One of its biggest competitors is Togetherwhich also hopes to help the company “turbocharge” its model construction work and raise more than $530 million in venture capital. mosiacml It also targeted the accelerated LLM building and raised $37 million before Databricks acquired it in 2023 for $1.3 billion.
For now, if ceramics want to open a place for themselves in this rapidly growing market, the work of ceramics will be reduced.
