Inephany, a London-based AI optimisation startup founded by former Apple Siri engineer John Torr, has secured £1.8 million to make large language model (LLM) training significantly more cost-effective.
With LLM development costs reaching tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds, Inephany is positioning itself as a critical solution provider by offering a more efficient alternative to current “brute force” training methods. The company is developing technology to streamline the training process, reduce computational waste, and accelerate outcomes.
Initially focused on LLMs, Inephany plans to broaden its impact across other AI architectures such as recurrent and convolutional neural networks.
The raise was led by Amadeus Capital Partners—best known for backing Oxford Nanopore—with participation from Sure Valley Ventures and AI veteran Steve Young, who has also joined the company as chair.
Current approaches to training LLMs and other neural networks are extremely wasteful across multiple dimensions. Our unique solution tackles this inefficiency head-on, with the potential to radically reduce both the cost and time required to train and optimise state-of-the-art models. As we prepare to deliver our first products later this year, we are incredibly excited to embark on the next chapter of our journey—and to help shape the ongoing AI revolution by transforming AI optimisation.
John Torr, Founder
Inephany’s innovative approach to automating and optimising neural network training has the potential to reduce costs by an order of magnitude and accelerate advancements across AI applications. If rolled out at scale, the impact of this on what models can deliver will be very substantial.
Amelia Armour, Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners
As the use of AI spreads ever wider, moving beyond the traditional applications of speech, language and vision into new and diverse areas such as weather prediction, healthcare, drug discovery and materials design, the need for very efficient training of accurate neural models is becoming critical. The groundbreaking new approach being developed by Inephany marks a step change in neural model training technology and I am delighted to join the team as chair and investor.
Steve Young, Chair
