Alembic Technologies raises $145M and buys an Nvidia-powered supercomputer to accelerate ‘causal AI’

Causal artificial intelligence startup Alembic Technologies Inc. said today it has raised $145 million in a Series B growth round that increases its valuation almost 16-fold.

It’s using a big chunk of those funds to invest in what it says is one of the fastest privately owned supercomputers ever built – a new Nvidia Corp. NVL72 superPOD that’ll serve as the foundation of its enterprise-grade AI models.

Alembic claims to be a pioneer of enterprise-focused causal AI models that focus on generating marketing intelligence. Causal AI models are designed to understand and model cause-and-effect relationships, as opposed to just identifying patterns and correlations. Alembic said it’s leveraging causal AI to generate richer insights into the underlying factors behind certain consumer behaviors and events, so it can enhance its customers’ decision-making.

In other words, Alembic is trying to develop more reliable AI models that can safely be used in enterprise environments, and to do that it needs to leverage its customers’ all-important private data. The startup said its Causal Engine acts like a private intelligence layer for AI models and creates a compounding flywheel. By surfacing better insights, companies can create superior products and strategies for their customers, which then help to capture more, potentially even richer data, allowing further insights to be generated.

Alembic co-founder and Chief Executive Tomás Puig said there’s really not much difference among the most powerful large language models today in terms of their performance or capabilities. It’s the proprietary data those models can access that provides the main competitive advantage. “Getting a real edge isn’t about using the best LLM,” he explained. “It’s about leveraging the unique information your rivals can’t access. The exclusive data a company generates protects its strategy from generic model outputs, where two competitors could get the same answers.”

Strategic bet on private AI infrastructure

The size of today’s round indicates that Alembic’s new supercomputer doesn’t come cheap, but Puig stressed that it’s a vital investment for the company. It’s planning to deploy the NVL72 superPOD, which is equipped with Nvidia’s most powerful Blackwell graphics processing units, in a vast DGX AI supercomputing cluster in partnership with the data center colocation provider Equinix Inc. The cluster will run the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite to provide a “high-performance computing backbone” for its causal AI models.

Puig said the system has been customized to run its continuous-learning spiking neural networks and spatio-temporal graph construction algorithms, enabling it to scale to support its growing customer base and continue generating fresh causal insights in real time. It’s notable that this is the second supercomputing cluster Alembic has acquired, as part of its strategic focus to ensure bicoastal redundancy and avoid being locked in to any cloud vendors. By investing in a dedicated, private AI fleet, Alembic benefits from guaranteed resource availability and gains the ability to better optimize its stack for causal AI workloads.

According to Puig, Alembic needs access to the world’s most advanced and capable computing platforms in order to be able to advance casual AI further. “[NVL72] allows our research teams to fully leverage multi-exaflop-level compute and Nvidia’s algorithmic software stack,” he explained. “This deep integration is one of our secret weapons – we spend more time on breakthrough research and mathematics and less time on repetitive low-level engineering, enabling us to deliver Causal answers to partners like Accenture in near real-time.”

Today’s round was co-led by Prysm Capital and Accenture Plc, and saw participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, NextEquity, Friends & Family Capital, WndrCo and SLW.

Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet said causal AI is critical for enterprise adoption of AI, because regulated companies need both high performance and extreme reliability. “Alembic’s Causal AI provides exactly that by moving the enterprise beyond correlation to deliver the verifiable, cause-and-effect insights leaders need to act with decisive speed,” she said.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Meta AI

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