EdgeRunner AI, a new startup building Generative AI for the edge,
announced its official launch and the closing of a $5.5 million
seed funding round led by Four Rivers Group with participation from
Madrona Ventures and strategic angels. The funding will go towards
building EdgeRunner AI's innovative platform, powered by
state-of-the-art transparent models designed to operate seamlessly on
any device or hardware without requiring internet access. This
technology will transform how enterprises and organizations responsibly
deploy Generative AI, providing them with hyper-personalization and
domain specific use cases.
"The challenge with Generative AI today lies in its broad applicability
without addressing specific business needs," said Tyler Xuan Saltsman,
Co-Founder and CEO of EdgeRunner AI. "At EdgeRunner, we empower
organizations to own their AI. From my military experience in Eastern
Europe, I saw the need for personalized, domain specific, and secure AI
in isolated environments. Black box proprietary models are aligned to
the cloud rather than the user. Understanding the biases within these
opaque models is complex and critical for both usability and safety. Our
approach ensures full transparency of models from weights and code to
architecture and datasets, that doesn't require you to move your data
and can run on any device and chip."
By developing small, task-specific open models optimized for any chip,
EdgeRunner AI elevates SLMs (Small Language Models) into Ultra-Efficient
Language Models (UELMs). This allows organizations to run AI models
locally on any device or hardware, resulting in improved performance,
increased data privacy, near zero latency, and reduced power
consumption, for a better, more sustainable future.
"Enterprises and governments don't need GPT-5 or AGI. What they need is
to responsibly deploy Generative AI to solve their real-world business
challenges using multiple small, task-specific open models working
together to create swarm intelligence," said Colton Malkerson,
Co-Founder & COO of EdgeRunner AI.