The race for faster AI inference is on, and markets gave Cerebras and its purpose-built chips a warm welcome in its IPO debut in May. But French startup Kog is betting that there’s a lot more power to be squeezed out of conventional GPUs.
The startup hit the front page of Hacker News in May with a tech preview aimed at proving that “extremely fast single-request decoding is possible on the standard datacenter GPUs enterprises already own” — such as the AMD MI300X and NVIDIA H200 GPUs it used for its demo.
Some were disappointed to hear this didn’t extend to GPUs in our laptops, but others saw the potential. With inference speed and costs now being a critical bottleneck, Kog’s promise to unlock new capabilities on existing hardware with software optimization attracted more than onlookers. “We had 200 tangible business leads,” CEO Gaël Delalleau told TechCrunch.
Based on early feedback, the solo founder expects software engineering to be the first use case. Veteran Claude Code users are well aware that they sometimes have to wait hours to get results. Anthropic itself understands that speed is worth money, and charges a price multiple for Claude’s Fast Mode.
Kog is hoping to target customers put off by those delays, usually because they rely on AI workflows for professional tasks. But the startup also has design partners that let users generate games and apps with a prompt, and for whom a faster outcome thanks to the Kog Inference Engine (KIE) would mean more revenue, Delalleau said.
