Seattle startup Moondream, led by AWS vets, raises $4.5M for vision language model software

Moondream, a new Seattle startup building a large language model for visual-related use cases, raised $4.5 million in a pre-seed round. VentureBeat reported on the funding.

The company offers a “vision language model” that can answer questions about images. The model is small by today’s standards, operating with 1.6 billion parameters, which allows the software to run on phones and edge devices.

“Our customers are chomping at the bit to build new vision features into their products,” Jay Allen, CEO of Moondream, wrote on LinkedIn. “From transportation, retail, manufacturing, security and more, they see Vision AI as a critical factor to their success.”

Allen previously spent seven years at Amazon Web Services, where he helped build AWS IQ, a marketplace for on-demand AWS talent, as well as internal sales products.

He was also the former CTO at Porch and was a senior director of development at Zynga, and spent a decade at Microsoft from 1994 to 2004.

Moondream CTO Vik Korrapati previously spent nine years at AWS.

Silicon Valley firm Felicis Ventures, Microsoft’s M12 GitHub Fund, and Seattle-based Ascend invested in the pre-seed round.