Investing in Lumino
Lumino AI is on a mission to unlock the power of AI for every human. This means making it as easy, fast, and cheap as possible to train and build AI.
Currently, many companies are having a hard time getting access to GPUs. Cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) control who gets access. So, SMEs bear the brunt of higher prices while enterprise customers receive discounted deals. Even then, enterprise customers often are waiting weeks to get GPU access.
A promising solution are decentralized compute protocols that leverage idle GPUs worldwide to train and fine-tune AI models. Lumino does this, but so do others.
But the Lumino team stands out because they are well aware that building a protocol with cheaper GPUs is not enough to get customers. To that end, they are building a hardware and software integrated SDK and web console to onboard customers, cognizant of the need to deliver the highest quality product and user experience for increasing productivity and lowering costs.
They have NVIDIA H100s, which even many centralized cloud providers don’t have, or they make their clients wait for weeks to access them. Compared to AWS, using H100s on Lumino can be as much as 65% cheaper. The Lumino network also comprises tens of thousands of consumer-grade GPUs, which are not available through AWS/GCP.
Global spend on AI training and fine-tuning is expected to reach $600B by 2030. By combining an edge on price, on-demand availability, consumer-grade GPUs, and on-demand H100s, Lumino offers a strong competitive advantage in this space.
Furthermore, Lumino offers something that no centralized cloud provider is doing — censorship resistance via an L2 compute marketplace using the blockchain as a coordination layer. The incentivized marketplace will allow compute providers to set their own price and also ensure that high-quality compute resources for training are being provided. A partnership with Filecoin would also allow tapping into Filecoin’s massive network of storage providers to easily become compute providers on Lumino.
We met Lumino’s founders Eshan and Yogesh just two weeks into its inception. It quickly became apparent that this wasn’t a team just talking the talk. They were already onboarding clients, showcasing not only their abundant access to compute resources but also their swift and agile approach to development.
We were super impressed with their backgrounds as well. Eshan previously designed Filecoin cryptoeconomics at Protocol Labs, built the world’s most advanced AI-powered wildfire risk model at Zesty.ai, and founded Nootry, a mobile product that helps people find healthy food at restaurants. Yogesh previously led infrastructure at TaxBit and Twilio to process billions of transactions per day. He also built large-scale distributed systems at AWS and founded a carpooling app to help solve traffic problems in metropolitan areas.
Delving deeper into the architecture of Lumino’s compute marketplace, we could see the potential of this product and team was undeniable. So we decided to dive head first to join them in their new venture, and we couldn’t be more excited about it.
We’re thrilled to partner with Lumino and build out the future of distributed computing on the blockchain and beyond together.
Welcome, Lumino!
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