Artificial intelligence startup Nomic AI said today it has closed on a $17 million early-stage funding round.

The Series A investment, which values Nomic at around $100 million, was led by Coatue and saw participation from Contrary Capital, Betaworks Ventures, SV Angel, Story Ventures and Factorial Capital, plus a host of angel investors.

New York-based Nomic, founded last year, has so far released two products, including an open-source large language model similar to ChatGPT that’s called GPT4ALL. It’s free to download for anyone to use, and it can run on small devices such as a laptop. The company’s second product is Atlas, which is a tool that makes it possible to visualize unstructured datasets that can be used to build other LLMs.

In a blog post, Nomic explained its open-source slant, saying that current LLM technology is concentrated in the hands of just a small number of companies that have outsized access to compute resources. It says there’s little transparency into how such company’s AI models work, and there’s a danger that the power of generative AI may end up concentrated in a very small number of hands.

Nomic wants to ensure everyone can benefit from generative AI, hence its efforts at creating a “vibrant, collaborative and open-source ecosystem.” The startup states that freely accessible code, datasets, documentation and model weights are essential for auditability and explainability of AI models.

Its models provide developers with an alternative to proprietary models such as OpenAI LP’s GPT-4 and Google LLC’s Bard, which require a subscription payment to access.

“We want to allow people to have access to the most powerful models that are specialized for the use cases they care about, and to build those systems themselves,” Nomic AI co-founder Andriy Mulyar told Reuters. “They need to be able to understand what data goes into those systems.”

Nomic reckons that more than 50,000 developers are currently using its open-source AI models, and it has existing partnerships with MongoDB Inc. and Replit Inc. Today, it announced a new partnership with Hugging Face Inc., creator of a popular platform called the Hugging Face Hub that hosts more than 100,000 open-source machine learning models. The partnership will see Nomic work with Hugging Face to create and distribute rich and interactive data visualizations.

Armed with its new funding, Nomic said it’s actively hiring for several roles across its team. It will also look to improve its existing product suite.

Image: Nomic