Mirai Raises $10M for On-Device AI
What happened
Mirai has closed a $10 million seed round to build a capability layer for on-device AI. The company aims to make local inference more efficient and accessible for developers, focusing on low-latency and privacy-preserving applications for consumer and edge devices.
Why it matters
- The founding team consists of Dima Shvets, co-founder of the viral face-swapping app Reface, and Alexey Moiseenkov, co-founder of the AI photo-filter app Prisma, bringing experience in scaling consumer AI applications with millions of users. - Mirai’s core technology is a proprietary inference engine built in Rust, initially optimized specifically for Apple Silicon, which it claims can improve model performance by up to 37% without altering model weights or quality. - The $10 million seed round was led by Uncork Capital and includes angel investments from notable figures such as the CEO of Dreamer, a YC Partner, a co-founder of Snowflake, and a co-founder of ElevenLabs. - Mirai is developing a hardware-aware runtime that acts as an interaction layer between AI models and device hardware, aiming to abstract away the complexity of memory management and kernel optimization for developers. - The company plans to use the funding to expand beyond Apple Silicon and support text, voice, vision, and multimodal workloads, with the goal of making on-device processing the default for AI applications. - This investment comes as the edge AI chip market is forecasted to grow significantly, with some projections expecting it to reach over $80 billion by 2036, driven by applications in automotive and AI-enabled smartphones. - The competitive landscape for on-device inference includes established solutions like Google's MediaPipe and open-source frameworks such as ONNX Runtime, highlighting the growing importance of optimizing AI performance on consumer hardware. - Mirai is also building an orchestration layer to create a hybrid system, allowing AI workloads that are too complex for the device to be seamlessly sent to the cloud for processing.
Key numbers
- Mirai has closed a $10 million seed round to build a capability layer for on-device AI.
- Mirai’s core technology is a proprietary inference engine built in Rust, initially optimized specifically for Apple Silicon, which it claims can improve model performance by up to 37% without altering model weights or quality.
- The $10 million seed round was led by Uncork Capital and includes angel investments from notable figures such as the CEO of Dreamer, a YC Partner, a co-founder of Snowflake, and a co-founder of ElevenLabs.
- This investment comes as the edge AI chip market is forecasted to grow significantly, with some projections expecting it to reach over $80 billion by 2036, driven by applications in automotive and AI-enabled smartphones.
What happens next
- The company plans to use the funding to expand beyond Apple Silicon and support text, voice, vision, and multimodal workloads, with the goal of making on-device processing the default for AI applications.
- The company aims to make local inference more efficient and accessible for developers, focusing on low-latency and privacy-preserving applications for consumer and edge devices.
Quick answers
What happened in Mirai Raises $10M for On-Device AI?
Mirai has closed a $10 million seed round to build a capability layer for on-device AI. The company aims to make local inference more efficient and accessible for developers, focusing on low-latency and privacy-preserving applications for consumer and edge devices.
Why does Mirai Raises $10M for On-Device AI matter?
The founding team consists of Dima Shvets, co-founder of the viral face-swapping app Reface, and Alexey Moiseenkov, co-founder of the AI photo-filter app Prisma, bringing experience in scaling consumer AI applications with millions of users. Mirai’s core technology is a proprietary inference engine built in Rust, initially optimized specifically for Apple Silicon, which it claims can improve model performance by up to 37% without altering model weights or quality. The $10 million seed round was led by Uncork Capital and includes angel investments from notable figures such as the CEO of Dreamer, a YC Partner, a co-founder of Snowflake, and a co-founder of ElevenLabs. Mirai is developing a hardware-aware runtime that acts as an interaction layer between AI models and device hardware, aiming to abstract away the complexity of memory management and kernel optimization for developers. The company plans to use the funding to expand beyond Apple Silicon and support text, voice, vision, and multimodal workloads, with the goal of making on-device processing the default for AI applications. This investment comes as the edge AI chip market is forecasted to grow significantly, with some projections expecting it to reach over $80 billion by 2036, driven by applications in automotive and AI-enabled smartphones. The competitive landscape for on-device inference includes established solutions like Google's MediaPipe and open-source frameworks such as ONNX Runtime, highlighting the growing importance of optimizing AI performance on consumer hardware. Mirai is also building an orchestration layer to create a hybrid system, allowing AI workloads that are too complex for the device to be seamlessly sent to the cloud for processing.
