From RNA therapeutics to a Web3 software development toolkit to LLM and NLP tools, the high-profile researchers turned founders are tackling a wide array of problems and raising a ton of capital. We break down the profiles of each founder and their companies.
In 2017, Google researchers published “Attention Is All You Need.” The paper introduced a new neural network architecture called the “Transformer” that could better understand and generate human language.
The paper was influential because it set a new standard for language understanding and paved the way for further research and development in this field. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, likely benefited from this research by incorporating the Transformer architecture into their own language models, such as GPT-4, which is one of the largest and most powerful language models ever created.
The Transformer paper was a major breakthrough in the field of natural language processing, and it helped to enable more advanced language models like the ones being developed by OpenAI.
So it’s no surprise that 6 out of the 8 researchers behind this paper have gone on to found companies and raise significant financing, often at large valuations.
Here is a summary of the companies and their total raised along with profiles of the respective authors turned founders, all taken from CB Insights.
Adept
- Funding: $415M
- Valuation: $1B
- Paper authors turned founders: Ashish Vaswani, Niki Parmar
Note: Niki Parmar left Adept in December 2022 and is now working on a stealth startup.
Adept develops AI tools that can interact with a range of everyday software to complete tasks in response to natural language user commands. The company was founded in 2021 and is based in San Francisco, California.
Character.AI
- Funding: $150M
- Valuation: $1B
- Paper author turned founder: Noam Shazeer
Character.AI develops a range of chatbots capable of engaging in open-ended conversations. The company offers applications spanning entertainment, education, idea generation, and more. Character.AI was founded in 2021 and is based in Menlo Park, California.
Cohere
- Funding: $165M
- Valuation: Rumored in Feb 2023 to be raising at a $6B valuation
- Paper author turned founder: Aidan Gomez
Cohere develops large language models for applications like content generation, summarization, and search. The company was founded in 2019 and is based in Toronto, Canada.
Inceptive
- Funding: $20M
- Valuation: Undisclosed
- Paper author turned founder: Jakob Uszkoreit
Inceptive focuses on applying AI to designing RNA molecules for applications like enabling new therapeutics. It was founded in 2021 and based in Palo Alto, California.
Pagoda
- Funding: $539M
- Valuation: Undisclosed
- Paper author turned founder: Illia Polosukhin
Pagoda provides tools for building blockchain-based Web3 applications. It was founded in 2017 and is based in Zug, Switzerland.
The 2 other paper authors also still remain active in AI. Lukasz Kaiser now works at OpenAI as a researcher and Llion Jones remains with Google researching natural language understanding.
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