Reka AI Secures $110 Million Funding, Achieves Unicorn Status with Backing from Snowflake and Nvidia

Snowflake, Nvidia Back New Unicorn Reka AI in $110 Million Deal

Artificial intelligence company Reka AI raised a $110 million funding round from investors including Nvidia Corp. and Snowflake Inc. -- a deal that more than triples the startup's valuation to over $1 billion. Reka AI makes large language models, the technology underpinning much of the generative AI craze, and says it can do it more efficiently than competitors. The startup was founded in 2022 by researchers from Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. It was previously valued at about $300 million in a 2023 investment round, according to PitchBook data.

Multimodal AI startup Reka AI raises $110M at $1B valuation - SiliconANGLE

Multimodal large language model research startup Reka AI Inc. today announced it has raised $110 million in fresh funding backed by Nvidia Corp. and Snowflake Inc. Founded in 2022, Reka develops multimodal models focusing on ultra-efficient training and serving infrastructure for delivering inference at low cost. The company offers multiple AI models including Reka Flash, a multimodal model capable of understanding video, images, text and audio, which is the flagship of the company's family of models. Reka Vision and Reka Research are the company's agentic AI platforms that have recently entered general availability providing complex question answering and visual search capabilities. According to a report from Bloomberg, the current funding round triples the company's valuation to $1 billion, up from about $300 million after the company raised $50 million in a funding round that included the participation of Snowflake's venture capital arm. Last year, Snowflake made overtures to acquire Reka, reportedly at a price more than three times higher than its valuation at the time. According to Bloomberg, the deal talks were scrapped after both companies decided to move on independently, but they still hold ties today. Vivek Raghunathan, vice president of AI engineering at Snowflake, told Bloomberg that Reka would provide AI models and other services to the company. "Very few teams in the world have the capability to build what they've built," Raghunathan said. "Almost everyone at that level of talent is at OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic. Reka is one of the rare independents -- and they've proven they can compete." Reka recently released a competitively performing version of Reka Flash 3.1 that the company said shows high performance against similarly sized models such as Quen3-32B and OpenAI's o3-mini. Reka Flash itself is a compact 21 billion-parameter model, which are the internal variables used by models to make decisions and also shape the overall size of a model impacting where it can fit. Using a method called quantization, a model's memory footprint can be reduced, allowing it to run with less resources, such as mobile or edge devices. According to the company, Reka Quant allows for almost lossless quantization when processing Reka Flash 3.1, bringing down the size significantly with very little performance loss. According to the company Reka, Quant reduces resource usage with only a 1.6-point average degradation on hard reasoning benchmarks. The next best quantization routine incurs a 6.7-point average degradation. The company has grown from 20 to 50 employees over the past year. Although initially focused on building efficient models, Reka also develops tools to assist companies with AI interfaces and application logic. Reka said it intends to use the investment to significantly accelerate technical development on its models and scale its multimodal platforms, aiming for wider enterprise adoption and expansion of its global reach.

AI Research Firm Reka Valued at $1 Billion | PYMNTS.com

The company's new funding round, announced Tuesday (July 22), included contributions from Nvidia and data cloud company Snowflake, and will help Reka scale its multimodal platform for more widespread enterprise adoption. "Reka is known for its ultra-efficient multimodal models developed by a world-class research team," the company said in a news release. "The company's focus on efficient training and serving infrastructure has enabled it to develop market-leading models at a fraction of the cost. Reka Flash -- a multimodal model that understands video, image, text, and audio -- is the workhorse of Reka's product offerings." The round values Reka at $1 billion, according to a report by Bloomberg News. The same report notes that Snowflake had held talks to acquire Reka last year, though those discussions ended when "both companies decided it made sense to move independently," CEO Dani Yogatama told Bloomberg. Vivek Raghunathan, vice president of AI engineering at Snowflake, said the company would offer Reka AI's models and other tools to its clients. "Very few teams in the world have the capability to build what they've built," Raghunathan said. "Almost everyone at that level of talent is at OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic. Reka is one of the rare independents -- and they've proven they can compete." Snowflake earlier this year announced plans for a new Silicon Valley "AI hub" as well as its goal of -- along with its startup accelerator and its venture capital partner -- investing up to $200 million in early stage startups. In other artificial intelligence news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the use of AI benchmarks -- the type of standards achieved each time companies like Google or OpenAI roll out a new model -- in helping guide vendor decisions, identify growth areas and determine whether a model is suitable. "The first path to discernment is understanding the nature of these benchmarks," the report said. "These benchmarks are standardized tests that measure an AI model's proficiency in several areas: math, science, language understanding, coding and reasoning, among other topics." Without benchmarks, companies would need to depend on marketing claims or one-sided case studies when figuring out which AI system to use.