Luminal raises $25M to build the compiler stack that unlocks heterogeneous AI compute across chip vendors

Speaker 2: Chat, Teddy.

Speaker 1: Congrats. Forget to buy the book. Buy the merch and also buy the book, The Bitter Struggle is available for sale now by Teddy Collins. And we have our last guest of the show, Joe from Luminal, the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show, Joe. Are Here he is.

Speaker 4: Yeah. From Flixaromniglass.

Speaker 1: It's been a gong less show so far, but we got some Kind of a nightmare news.

Speaker 2: For us.

Speaker 1: Yes. It it was. But introduce yourself. We've talked about the company before, but give us the elevator pitch and then tell us about the round.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So I'm Joe. I'm the CEO of Luminal. Luminal is... I describe it as a software defined accelerator company. And so, you know, basically, all AI accelerators have a hardware component and a software component. And what we realized is there's actually a lot of accelerator companies that can make the hardware component and only one that can kind of make the software component. And they're they're worth 5,000,000,000,000 now. May have heard of them right now. And so, you know, what we realized is we should really go out and solve the real bottleneck here, is the software component. We should basically unlock... Build this compiler stack to unlock all this heterogeneous compute that's coming online. Mhmm. And so I think, you know, today we've really heard the starting gun for this race to commoditize compute. Yeah. I think that's gonna... You know, we're really excited about it. But, yeah, that that's the... A little a

Speaker 2: little suspicious that you timed your you timed your fundraising...

Speaker 1: Tell us about the fundraise. How much did Yeah. You

Speaker 4: So we we raised 25,000,000. And thank you. And... Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't blame him. Jensen saw our compiler and he knew it was time to bail. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's what happened.

Speaker 7: Okay. Okay.

Speaker 2: This goes deeper than deeper than I thought.

Speaker 1: What what what is your go to market? Are you partnering with a particular hyper scale or particular chip startup? Do you want to work? Like, who... Where is the key customer to help actually grow and produce the product?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So, I mean, we kind of partner with everybody. We partner with the chip companies to build the compiler for their chips. Yeah. We go and directly license out to other neo clouds and foundation model company... Foundation model labs and inference providers. And then we also run an in house lab and... Or an in house inference cloud. Sorry. And so that's kinda targeted at, you know, larger customers that own their own hardware, we license directly to them. And smaller companies who want to basically just have us host the the the inference, we go and host it ourselves.

Speaker 1: Yeah. How is how is demand at the chip level changing over the last couple months or even couple years? I mean, we went through the the the the reasoning leap, the agentic leap. Like, what are your customers asking for? What are you making sure that you can deliver at like a dollar per watt level?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So I mean, fundamentally, it all comes down to cost. Mhmm. Speed is good, but speed beyond a threshold isn't super useful. People almost 10 times out of 10 when given faster or cheaper will pick cheaper. And so we're always very focused on throughput. And we really like accelerators that have a big throughput focus. So, you know, our work on Trainium, for instance, we get excellent results out of Trainium. On our cloud, we're doing, you know, something like a 100,000,000,000,000 a month and, you know, we're ramping a lot of that on Trainium. And we get, you know, pretty phenomenal even against, like, Blackwell Ultra, pretty phenomenal price performance Yeah. On on Trainium. So we're really excited about that.

Speaker 1: How far are you along with discussions with some of the new chip companies? I'm thinking about an Edge or Cerebris. There's a whole host of other companies that are actually doing the fab work to make the chips. And they sometimes have different trade offs, but do you have a role to play with them as they come online over the next couple of years?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So I mean, have conversations with all of them. One of our first partnerships to to make the compiler back end was with Positron.

Speaker 7: And, you

Speaker 1: know, I believe

Speaker 4: you guys have had Mitesh Yeah. On. So we're we're big fans of Positron. We're actually ramping their their Atlas chips in our cloud right now as well. Fantastic. So we love them. And, yeah, I mean, really, what we're concerned with is it actually is faster to bring up a compiler back end than it is to tape a chip out. So we actually come in pretty late in the process of Sure. Of building a chip. They generally come with a completed design to us. Yeah. We kinda figure out the lowest level software primitives, wrap them, and then, you know, go on up from there.

Speaker 6: And

Speaker 4: so we were able to, yeah, get to Positron support within a few months with working with them.

Speaker 1: That's awesome. Wow. Alright. Jordy, anything else?

Speaker 2: No. Really impressive progress.

Speaker 1: Hugely impressive progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations.

Speaker 2: I'm sure you'll be back soon.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure the

Speaker 2: term the the b term sheets have have already hit the inbox. Well,

Speaker 1: it works out. Hopefully you're not on Outlook because if you're on Outlook, you're gonna have to wait for the term sheet. But thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Great to hang out. Congrats.

Speaker 1: Have a good one. Goodbye. Well, we made it through. We had the opportunity to get better at podcasting while a little under the weather and we did it. Is there anything else that's hit the timeline? The chat has been very helpful in keeping us up to date. There have been rumors of a of a third third Jensen affair. I don't know how confirmed that is at this point. Tyler, have you been tracking this at all?

Speaker 5: Yes. That was confirmed in Reuters.

Speaker 1: In Reuters.

Speaker 5: Okay. So this was like a second In... Employee.

Speaker 1: Okay. Yes. And of course, the employee line is is is firmly in the sand at NVIDIA. But they have already taken the action because Jensen is no longer the CEO. So not a huge update there, but still worth sharing. Also, if you just tuned tuned in late to the show, merch.tbpn, we did a merch drop today. I believe there's some items that are still in stock, but...

Speaker 7: Yeah. There's socks. In some

Speaker 5: small sizes or extra large sizes.

Speaker 1: Okay. We have a few sizes depending on your size. Go check it out. Merch.tbpn.com. We have a whole host of of products available, of course, hosted. But thank you for being with us. Thank you for tuning in during this tumultuous time in technology. We have a real wild run of shows next week. We'll be at Tomorrow X in Austin on Tuesday and Wednesday interviewing many of the top investors, CEOs, founders in this industry understanding more of what this news means for the technology industry as well as just what's going on with the AI trade broadly. Did we forget about how it gets till Christmas?

Speaker 2: People are asking to see the white jacket which is now sold out in every size except the XXL which is bad because I went to the the team tried to find what I thought was my personal white jacket. It is gone.

Speaker 1: It's been pilfered.

Speaker 2: Somebody Somebody

Speaker 1: stole it.

Speaker 2: Somebody had their hands in the in the merch jar.

Speaker 1: But we did we did forget the the Christmas count, so we gotta tell everyone how many days until Christmas because that's that's why you come to this show. That's why you come to this show. There are forty two days until Christmas. And in a coincidence, NVIDIA has 42,000 employees. So counting it down. Christmas came early with the merch drop. Go pick something up. Put it under the Christmas tree. It's never too early to start your Christmas shopping. But I know if you've been watching this show, you you were... You got your Christmas shopping done three months ago. I got... I need to see it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. The next merch drop will not take almost two years. So...

Speaker 1: The camera's tracking me. So I'm losing ground. There we go. No. Oh, it's moving me up. Well, thank you for tuning into TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com And have

Speaker 2: Good luck out there.

Speaker 1: Thursday ever. Love you. Bye.