Scaleout Systems: Shaping the Future of Federated Learning

In many real-world scenarios, data is generated in a decentralized manner, such as through sensor networks, or the data is too sensitive to be shared or stored centrally—so a new approach to model training is needed to process this data.

Scaleout Systems was founded in 2018 by Andreas Hellander, Salman Toor, Daniel Zakrisson, Ebba Kraemer, Jens Frid, Morgan Ekmefjord, and Ola Spjuth. The startup enables data scientists to adopt federated learning quickly and smoothly to train models across decentralized data sources while maintaining high standards for data privacy and security. In late 2023, Scaleout Systems raised $1.5M from Navigare Ventures, Almi Invest, and Uppsala University Invest.

Learn more about the future of federated learning from our interview with the co-founder and CEO, Andreas Hellander:

Future of Computing News

💥 Wolfspeed shelves plans to build chip factory in Germany (Reuters)

🦾 Denmark’s first AI supercomputer is now operational (Novo Nordisk Foundation)

🦾 Qualcomm reveals AI smartphone chip as industry leans into AI phones (Yahoo! Finance)

💥 Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license, endangering its chip business (Ars Technica)

💥 Does the Draghi Report Miss the Bigger Picture on Semiconductors? (EE Times)

🦾 Data center tech is exploding but adoption won’t be easy for startups (TechCrunch)

🧬 Lab-grown human brain cells drive virtual butterfly in simulation: Could organoid-driven computing be the future of AI power? (The Register)

🤖 BitNet: Microsoft’s inference framework for 1-bit LLMs (GitHub)

🤖 Introducing computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku (Anthropic)

🤖 Initial explorations of Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability (Simon Willison’s Weblog)

⚡️ Celestial AI Acquires Rockley Photonics Patent Portfolio, Strengthening Photonic Fabric™ IP (businesswire)

⚡️ Investors pour into photonics startups to stop data centers from hogging energy and to speed up AI (Fortune)

⚡️ The Money Keeps Rolling In For Optical Interconnects (Next Platform)

Funding News

🤖 Aya Data, a Ghana-based AI startup, has raised $900,000 in a seed round to offer data collection and annotation services (Tech Labari)

🤖 Helsinki-based DataCrunch Raises €12 million to hyperscale AI Computing in Europe (EU Startups)

🤖 Agentic AI startup CrewAI closes $18M funding round (Silicon Angle)

🤖 Paris-based GenAI startup LightOn to IPO at a €50m valuation (Sifted)

⚛️ Reports: SandboxAQ Seeking New Funding at a $5 Billion Valuation (The Quantum Insider)

⚡️ Optical Networking Startup Oriole Networks Raises $22M (Photonics)

Good Reads

🦾 RISC-V in 2024 is Slower Than You Think (Ben Houston's Blog)

“Most commercial RISC-V chips remain in-order processors, meaning they execute instructions sequentially rather than optimizing their order for performance. This architectural simplicity creates a fundamental performance ceiling that's difficult to overcome without significant architectural changes.”

🤖 You Should Probably Pay Attention to Tokenizers (Cybernetist)

“I want to focus on tokenization because I feel like it’s one of those things that is somewhat understood from a high-level point of view, but the deeper you dig in the more gaps in your knowledge you will discover and from my experience it’s often those gaps that often make or break AI apps.”

🤖 Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis (arXiv)

“In this work, we present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive masked image modeling (MIM) text-to-image to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL.”

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