Avocado toast meets red meat and potatoes.
That’s not the most familiar way to describe Seattle, but it’s why Phaidra decided to launch its company in the Emerald City.
The stealthy startup just raised $1.5 million to help provide artificial intelligence technology for customers across the industrial sector.
The 4-person company is led by Jim Gao and Vedavyas Panneershelvam, two former employees at DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI research hub, as well as Katherine Hoffman, a defense and HVAC industry veteran.
The founders aren’t from Seattle, but they saw it as the perfect place to launch their company given the robust tech ecosystem and proximity to manufacturers.
“Seattle is a major tech hub that never forgot its industrial origins — we often joke amongst ourselves that Seattle is where ‘avocado toast’ meets ‘red meat and potatoes,'” Gao told GeekWire. “As a startup defined at the intersection of industrials and tech, we felt it especially important to share the cultural values of both industries. Also, the coffee is pretty good.”
Phaidra aims to help industrial companies develop in-house AI solutions. The startup is still building out the beta version of its product.
“We started Phaidra to broaden access to the technology by enabling industry practitioners to directly develop their own AI solutions,” Gao explained. “While many tools already exist for data scientists or software engineers, our experience suggests that domain expertise is the primary driver of AI performance. AI would be significantly more impactful and useful if the people who understand their domains best were the ones applying AI.”
The company also wants to help its customers maintain ownership of their data and intellectual property. Gao said companies usually partner with large tech companies to develop AI products — a “double-edged sword” because those companies can use the data themselves.
“The root of the problem is that the world’s AI talent is concentrated in a few large companies,” Gao said. “If you could make AI more accessible to non-experts, you can solve this problem.”
Gao led a 14-person team at DeepMind focused on building AI tech for the energy sector. It helped reduce Google’s data center cooling energy consumption by 40%, for example. DeepMind, acquired by Alphabet-owned Google in 2014, is famous for developing the AlphaGo program that beat a human world champion.
Gao said the COVID-19 crisis has caused industrial businesses to hold off on long-term projects. In the meantime the company is focusing on helping customers reduce energy consumption and yield optimization by using AI.
Seattle-based venture capital firm Flying Fish led the seed round. Section 32; FirstMinute Capital; NJF Capital; and the University Washington, via a student-led investment program at the Foster School of Business, also participated.
