Sail Research raises $80M to optimize long-horizon AI agents
Artificial intelligence inference startup Sail Research Inc. today announced that it has raised $80 million in funding at a $450 million valuation.
The company received the bulk of the capital in the form of a Series A round led by Sequoia. It earlier raised a seed round led by Kleiner Perkins. Sail Research also counts Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan, Alphabet Inc. chair John Hennessy and Redpoint Ventures among its investors.
Sail Research operates a cloud platform that developers can use to run long-horizon artificial intelligence agents. According to the company, its infrastructure enables agents to tackle tasks that take upwards of weeks to complete. Furthermore, Sail Research claims that it can run such workloads at a fraction of the price charged by competitors.
The company says that its platform is powered by customized versions of several open-source inference engines. An inference engine is a tool that lowers the hardware usage of AI models. One of the most widely used tools in the category is vLLM, which partly owes its popularity to an algorithm called PagedAttention. The algorithm speeds up inference by enabling AI models to make more efficient use of graphics’ cards built-in memory.
