Petuum Earns Spot on CB Insights’ Prestige List of Top 100 AI Startups; Announces New Performance Benchmark for Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

PITTSBURGH, Pa., Feb. 02, 2017 -- Petuum, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI) technology startup based in Pittsburgh, was named to the AI 100, a prestigious list of the 100 most promising private AI companies globally. The AI 100 is produced by CB Insights, a leading authority on trends in AI and related technologies.

“This is an honor for us, and it speaks volumes for the efforts of our extremely talented team,” said Dr. Eric Xing, CEO and co-founder of Petuum, Inc. “We are truly revolutionizing and redefining the way people develop artificial intelligence and machine learning software by creating standard techniques that can be replicated anywhere.”

Founded by a leading Carnegie Mellon University AI researcher and with several of the most prominent names in the AI research field listed as advisors, Petuum recently closed its Series A funding of $15 million (USD) from venture capital firms and strategic investor. Petuum and the rest of the AI 100 companies represent the top 6% of artificial intelligence startups globally.

In December at the 2016 Strata + Hadoop World Conference in Singapore, Dr. Qirong Ho, VP Technology at Petuum, announced that Petuum technology now solves certain AI problems 200 times faster than Apache Spark, and 20 times faster than Google TensorFlow. Ho also unveiled the first public demonstration of the PetuumOS product. In this demonstration, an AI application is created and tested on a laptop using the popular Python programming language, and is then seamlessly deployed to a datacenter with a single command, instantly upgrading the AI application’s speed. The PetuumOS platform greatly lowers barriers to AI technology, by allowing engineers and data scientists to create enterprise AI applications using familiar workstation or laptop interfaces, and to effortlessly deploy and scale these AI applications to datacenters.

Petuum is building a so-called “omni-mount” enterprise AI platform, that is, it can be mounted on a wide variety of industry computing environments. The Petuum platform is also designed to support all types of machine learning algorithms that power AI applications. These algorithms range from statistical modeling and simulation, predictive analytics, knowledge extraction and content summarization, to ensemble methods and deep learning. They allow computers to effectively and accurately classify data, find patterns and make predictions, and can be applied to help computers better conduct tasks like natural language processing, image and video understanding, and anomaly detection in transaction data.

The Petuum platform comes with its own operating system that is specialized for managing parallel and distributed machine learning computation on top of heterogeneous hardware configurations, which reduces the deployment of large scale AI applications in enterprises from a labor-intensive and lengthy endeavor to a few commands or mouse clicks.

Different from many companies that build AI applications on top of open source toolboxes, Petuum technologies emerged from years of research and development by a team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, who has pioneered many key technologies driving industry-scale AI applications, such as the parameter server architecture for CPU and GPU clusters, and elastic resource management strategies.

With these technologies, Petuum turns complex enterprise computing infrastructures into a virtual machine with a simple laptop-like interface, making AI applications easy to create and run quickly, at massive scale and over many computing devices without compromising output quality.

About Petuum, Inc.

Petuum, Inc. is building a platform that serves the full spectrum of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms and applications. Its product enables enterprises to build practical AI and ML deployments for the real world.

For more information, visit www.petuum.com.

About CB Insights

CB Insights is the authority on emerging trends in artificial intelligence with its AI trends data regularly featured by leading media. The company's newsletter featuring its AI research is read by 206,000+ subscribers. CB Insights data has been cited 1500+ times by premiere media outlets including The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, Fortune, TechCrunch and more.

The CB Insights AI 100 recognizes the teams and technologies that are successfully using AI to solve big challenges. The award winners were announced January 10^th, 2017 at The Innovation Summit hosted in Santa Barbara, CA.

Copyright © 2017, Petuum, Inc. All rights reserved.

Contacts
Petuum, Inc.
Ning Li
[email protected]