Flower Labs secures 20 million US dollars in financing round
The Hamburg-based AI startup Flower Labs has closed a Series A financing round of 20 million euros. Flower is the leading open source community and ecosystem for training artificial intelligence using decentralised data.
The financing round is led by Californian venture capitalist Felicis. Other investors are First Spark Ventures, Factorial Capital, Beta Works, Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Mozilla Ventures and well-known business angels such as Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, and Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub. Early adopters of the Flower framework include dozens of Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 companies, including Samsung and Nokia Bell Labs, as well as technology innovators such as Brave and Banking Circle.
Flower Labs breaks new ground in AI training
Flower Labs aims to bring about a fundamental change in the way AI models are trained and used. The current standard in AI is centralised training, which requires large-scale data collection in the cloud. However, there are proven decentralised alternatives such as federated learning that offer a radically different approach. With federated learning, the data remains where it is naturally generated, namely in the source - for example, in a company, a production line, a car or even a smartphone. The AI training calculations are then performed on the data in this original location; instead of the data itself, only the results of these calculations are transferred from each location.
The founders of Flower Labs, Daniel Beutel, Taner Topal and Nicholas Lane, met at the University of Cambridge. They launched the Flower framework for federated learning as a research project in 2020. The company, headquartered in Hamburg, was officially founded in 2023 and in the same year the trio closed a pre-seed financing round of 3.6 million euros.
