The launch coincides with a successful fundraising round from investors on both sides of the border.<\/p>\n
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A new platform designed by Canadian tech veterans Ali Asaria and Tony Salomone today announced a successful fundraising round that coincides with the platform\u2019s worldwide launch.<\/p>\n
Transformer Lab<\/a>, designed to streamline research into artificial intelligence (AI) by replacing outdated, sometimes decades-old operating systems with a unified, modern operating system, announced a successful pre-seed fundraising round on Monday. The round includes participation from noteworthy firms on both sides of the Canada-US border, including Hawktail, Ripple Ventures, and Garage Capital.<\/p>\n Asaria declined to specify exactly how much the pre-seed investment round raised, but said the funding has been instrumental in scaling the platform and was critical in moving Transformer Lab to global deployment.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were going to build a research company; we ended up building the tools to build a research company.\u201d<\/p>\n Ali Asaria, Transformer Lab<\/p>\n \u201cWe built out our first protocols of this system, and we started demoing to a select few folks in Canada and the US,\u201d Asaria said. \u201cWe were basically trying to build enough runway and get enough funding so that we had enough time to take it to an enterprise launch, which is where we are now.\u201d<\/p>\n Asaria and Salomone have been tinkering away on Transformer Lab for roughly the last year, which started as a passion project for the two long-time colleagues. During their early work, Asaria said the duo quickly recognized limitations in the tools being used across the industry.<\/p>\n \u201cWe started doing fundamental research\u2026we were like \u2018Hey, could we build our own transformer architecture from scratch and go head-to-head against some of the biggest players like OpenAI,\u201d Asaria said. \u201cIn the process of doing that research we were just so surprised by the quality of tools to do it. We were building as we were going and saying, \u2018what\u2019s the cutting edge stuff out there?\u2019 and every time we just kept hitting walls.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe basically learned that the maturity of the tool set is so behind the output of [the industry],\u201d Asaria added. \u201cSo, we thought we were going to build a research company; we ended up building the tools to build a research company.\u201d<\/p>\n Those tools are ones that Asaria hopes will become the standard for AI research labs. The platform brings together a single dashboard, scalability across personal hardware and high-performance computing clusters, robust customization, and a privacy-first design, according to Transformer Lab\u2019s announcement.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Asaria and Salomone previously worked together at Asaria\u2019s retail startups Tulip and Well.ca<\/a>, one of Canada\u2019s largest e-commerce companies.\u00a0<\/p>\n