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February 19, 2024

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: the founders Nicholas Lane, Daniel Beutel and Taner Topal
© Flower Labs: the founders Nicholas Lane, Daniel Beutel and Taner Topal

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.

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Startup City Hamburg

Startup City Hamburg is the central point of contact for Hamburg's startup ecosystem: we report on news & events, founders, and success stories from the scene, provide context on current developments, and keep track of funding opportunities. With personalized guidance from our Startup Guides and a network of founders, investors, and institutions, we give aspiring founders and startups an overview of the ecosystem.

Startup City Hamburg is part of IFB Innovationsstarter GmbH and is funded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg through the Ministry of Economics, Labour and Innovation (BWAI).

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