Israeli startup Nuweba Labs Ltd. today added support for graphics processing units to its namesake serverless computing platform, which it claims can now run machine learning models 100 times faster than Amazon Web Services Inc.’s competing offering.

Nuweba emerged from stealth this year with $4.8 million in initial funding from Magma Partners, Target Global and a few other investors. The startup’s platform enables developers to run code in the cloud without having to provision the underlying hardware resources manually. Nuweba has the bold goal of challenging market leader AWS’ Lambda serverless computing service, as well as the comparable offerings provided by Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

The rival solutions in the category aren’t particularly well-suited for artificial intelligence workloads, as the startup tells it. One of the main reasons it cites is speed — or rather the lack thereof. In a test conducted by Nuweba engineer Rony Lutsky, AWS Lambda took nine seconds to launch a TensorFlow machine learning model after receiving a piece of data for processing, whereas the startup’s platform fired up the same model in under a 10th of a second.

That means Nuweba’s platform performed about 100 times faster in the benchmark. The startup claims that it can provide even better model launch speeds, as little as three-thousandths of a second, for less demanding serverless algorithms.

A few seconds can make a big difference for many applications. An AI-powered analytics system that processes terabytes of data per day can’t afford a nine-second delay between each request. The same goes for consumer services such as mobile apps, which need to provide a snappy experience for users in order to stay competitive.

It’s that dynamic on which Nuweba is counting to help it win customers away from AWS and the cloud industry’s other major players. Another area where the startup is trying to set itself apart from the incumbents is security. Nuweba’s platform has no fewer than six built-in mechanisms for preventing breaches, including a firewall and an anomaly detection engine that spots hacking attempts.

Photo of  Nuweba co-founders Ido Neeman and Yan Cybulski: Nuweba