Essential AI, an artificial intelligence startup founded by two authors of a seminal research paper at Google is disclosing details for the first time Tuesday, saying it has raised $56.5 million in new funding. The company will use AI for corporate functions such as data analysis and promises to automate monotonous tasks, work that Chief Executive Officer Ashish Vaswani says is “harder than it should be.” The startup is calling its technology the “Enterprise Brain.” March Capital led the financing round, which includes participation from chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Franklin Venture Partners, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Nvidia Corp. and Thrive Capital. Essential was started by Vaswani and Niki Parmar, who co-authored the influential article “Attention Is All You Need” with six others AI heavyweights when they worked at Google in 2017. The paper established the basic precepts of large language models, which generate new content by ingesting immense amounts of information. LLMs form the basis of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Essential AI declined to disclose its valuation in the funding round, which Bloomberg reported in September. Earlier this year, Essential raised $8.3 million in a deal led by Thrive Capital. Jamie Montgomery, co-founder and managing partner of March Capital, said the firm was “thrilled” to invest in a company driving innovation in AI for business customers. Montgomery is taking a board seat at the company.
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