Synced

About Synced

Nexa AI, founded in 2023, is a research and deployment company focused on on-device Artificial Intelligence. The company's core mission is to make on-device AI accessible and ready for production without friction. Their primary offering is a framework for on-device inference that allows any model to run on any device, aiming to shift human-computer interaction from graphical user interfaces to natural language prompts.

The company was co-founded by CEO Wei (Alex) Chen and CTO Zhiyuan (Zack) Li, both alumni of Stanford University. Alex Chen pursued his PhD studies at Stanford in mechanics and computation, providing him with a strong foundation in mathematics and programming. Zack Li gained industry experience in on-device AI during his time at Google and Amazon Lab126. The founders reconnected at a Stanford Chinese Entrepreneurs Organization event and decided to collaborate, driven by a shared interest in creating fundamental, groundbreaking technology. Their journey began with developing an avatar generation algorithm, which helped them secure initial funding from Fusion Fund. A pivotal moment came at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where they identified a market need for efficient on-device large language models, leading to their current focus.

Nexa AI operates in the business-to-business software market, providing a general framework solution that enables companies to run AI models directly on their hardware. This approach is designed to be faster and more power-efficient than cloud-based alternatives. The business model centers on providing this specialized technology to other businesses, helping them overcome the challenges of deploying large language models on devices. As of August 2024, Nexa AI had raised a total of $16.5M in funding from investors including Alumni Ventures, Maxitech, Plug and Play Tech Center, and Fusion Fund.