Europe has spent the better part of the AI boom watching from the sidelines while American and Chinese companies built the models that now power everything from customer service bots to drug discovery. Italy’s Domyn wants to change that, and it’s putting a timeline on the ambition: one year.
The Milan-based startup announced plans to release a fully open-source frontier AI model anticipated to exceed 400 billion parameters. The model will be trained from scratch and designed to run on local servers, a detail that matters enormously for the regulated industries Domyn is targeting.
From iGenius to billion-dollar contender
Domyn wasn’t always called Domyn. Founded in 2016 in Milan, the company previously operated under the name iGenius before rebranding. Under CEO Uljan Sharka, the company has grown its valuation to over $1 billion, backed in part by G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud computing firm.
The company currently offers two models: Domyn Small, which has 10 billion parameters, and the larger Domyn model. It also has a collaboration with NVIDIA for supercomputing capabilities. But the planned frontier model represents a massive leap in scale, moving from the tens of billions of parameters to over 400 billion.
