When developers have a selected task that AI can solve, it's often not as easy as simply pointing an LLM at the info. There are other considerations similar to cost, speed and accuracy, and finding ways to balance all of those points has been particularly difficult, especially with so many recent models coming online on a regular basis.
That's where Unify Enter, a British startup from an Imperial College graduate who has developed a router tool that permits developers to enter parameters and find the very best LLM for his or her individual requirements, whatever they could be. On Wednesday, the corporate announced an $8 million investment.
“Unify’s essential goal is to work out which models from which vendors are best to your job using objective benchmarks and dashboards that mean you can compare them,” company founder and CEO Daniel Lenton told TechCrunch.
“The router is effectively a natural extension of this process, particularly as enterprises begin to deploy at scale and speed and price change into more necessary. “So what we’re really attempting to do is give people rather a lot more control over the standard, the fee and the speed profile of their LLM applications,” Lenton said.
Unsurprisingly, Unify uses AI to run the router's core application. “Our router itself is a learning neural network. So it learns which models are best suited to which tasks,” he said. The company does this by running comprehensive benchmarks on all of those tasks for every recent model, using GPT Pro as a judge. From this, the system learns how well this model performed certain tasks in its training sets.
“So any recent model vendor shall be supported by the router in a short time, principally a day or two later,” he said.
Lenton says that the router and the best way they’ve developed a novel model to coach it’s in itself a strategy to protect his startup's operations from incursions from the larger players and that they’re neutral and the Hyperscalers is probably not neutral.
He said customers often just experiment with different models and don't have a tool to work out which is best.
“There are people whose problems are on fire and are willing to try an existing solution. I feel that’s how we managed to get our foot within the door,” he said.
Although there are competitors like Martian Router, OpenRouter and Portkey, Lenton says his company is the one one which optimizes together for quality, cost and speed.
The company is currently small, with seven employees, and he's intentionally keeping it lean as he works to bring a completely monetized product to market. The plan is to rent three more employees this 12 months.
He reports about 3,000 registrations to this point with just a few hundred regular users. They expect to earn cash because they charge corporations fees to create their very own custom benchmarks. Any business can start using the tool with a $50 credit.
The $8 million investment got here from a lot of investors including SignalFire, M12, J12, Essence VC and A. Capital. Lunar VC, Y Combinator and a lot of distinguished industry figures.
