Flower Labs has raised $20M to bring federated and decentralized AI to mainstream

The company recently announced the completion of the Series A funding round led by Felicis, making the latter the most recent investor to join an already impressive list featuring First Spark Ventures, Y Combinator, Mozilla Ventures, and angels such as Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. Flower Labs notably completed a $3.6 million pre-seed round led by First Spark Ventures after wrapping up the 2023 winter batch of Y Combinator a mere nine months before raising the Series A.

Federated and decentralized AI goes against the centralization standard by forgoing data collection. Instead, the data remains at its source, where AI training computation is performed, and only the result of this computation is transferred to the cloud. Thus, federated and decentralized AI can leverage data inaccessible to centralized projects and offer better data privacy protections while facilitating and hastening AI building. Consequently, federated and decentralized AI is less dependent on GPUs and complies with the upcoming regulations better than centralized AI.

Interest in centralized AI alternatives is catching on: Flower Labs reports that over a thousand open-source projects are already using the Flower framework, including collaborations or code contributions involving corporations such as Intel and Bosch Research. Moreover, Flower's community boasts over 3000 open-source developers, including research labs in some of the world's top universities, who often contribute back to the community. Flower Labs also plays its part in fostering the growth of this community, launching initiatives such as the Flower Summer of Reproducibility and the yearly Flower AI Summit.

Flower Labs plans to invest the recently raised funding into developing a platform that will work alongside its open-source framework to simplify federated AI deployments and widen the FedGPT technology set of use cases.