Substrate Labs Inc., the operator of a cloud platform for building artificial intelligence applications, today announced that it has secured $8 million in seed funding.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the raise. It was joined by South Park Commons, Craft Ventures and several angel investors.

“New AI models offer enormous potential, but the tools developers have access to today are impeding the deployment of intelligence into software systems,” said Substrate co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Rob Cheung. “We built Substrate to help developers create AI-integrated programs intuitively, in the same way they create any other program: by relating small semantic tasks to each other to automate work.”

Many AI applications rely on not one but several neural networks to power their features. A marketing automation tool, for example, might use one model to generate ad copy and a second to translate the text into multiple languages. Substrate’s namesake cloud platform is designed to simplify the development of such applications.

According to the company, its platform can host all the neural networks used by a program in a single environment. That’s simpler than the traditional approach of mixing and matching neural networks hosted by several different AI providers. By removing the complexity associated with using multiple providers, Substrate promises to speed up software development.

The company’s platform provides access to more than a half dozen prepackaged large language models. The lineup includes Meta Platform Inc.’s Llama 3 model series, as well as several LLMs from well-funded AI developer Mistral. Substrate also provides neural networks optimized for other tasks such as image generation.

Alongside the AI models, the platform includes a number of other software building blocks often needed for AI applications. There’s a vector database, or a database optimized to store the mathematical structures in which neural networks keep the information they ingest. Meanwhile, a built-in code interpreter allows an application’s AI models to generate and run Python scripts.

Substrate says that its platform not only simplifies software development but also boosts AI workloads’ performance in the process. When each of an application’s neural networks is hosted on a different provider’s platform, data can take a significant amount of time to travel between them. Substrate, in contrast, says that its platform can move data between AI models with microsecond latency.

The company began developing its platform about a year ago. It made the offering generally available today in conjunction with the announcement of its seed round. 

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