SAN FRANCISCO — Essential AI has raised a $56.5 million Series A funding round led by March Capital including participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, NVIDIA, and Thrive Capital. Essential AI previously raised an $8.3 million seed funding round led by Thrive Capital, with participation from investors Amjad Masad, Brad Gerstner, Conviction, Elad Gil, Francis D’Souza, David H. Patraeus, Gustavo Sapoznik, Jamie Montgomery, and Mei Zuo for a total of nearly $65 million in funding to date.
Founded in 2023, Essential AI’s mission is to deepen the partnership between humans and computers, unlocking collaborative capabilities that far exceed what could be achieved by humans alone. To reinvent how enterprises work, Essential AI is developing full-stack AI products that quickly learn to increase productivity by automating time-consuming and monotonous workflows. With human feedback and technical breakthroughs, Essential AI’s LLMs will empower users to solve progressively harder tasks and unlock critical skills, scaling the impact of organizations on society.
Essential AI’s co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, worked together at Google and were co-creators of the revolutionary Transformer architecture that underpins most advancements in AI today. “Niki and I are excited to build a world-class, multi-disciplinary team of engineers, researchers, designers, and sales and product experts who are ready to solve real-world AI challenges and create a massive new market opportunity,” said Vaswani, CEO of Essential AI.
“We are thrilled to invest in Essential AI as it drives innovation at the intersection of enterprise adoption of AI and the emergence of enterprise-grade LLMs,” said Jamie Montgomery, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of March Capital and a board member of Essential AI. “We look forward to partnering with the Essential AI team and leveraging March Capital’s industry expertise and global network to support Essential AI’s continued growth.”
