The startup Assisterr, founded by Ukrainians Nik Gavrylyak and Dmytro Dimenko, has raised $1.7 million in a pre-seed round.
Among the investors in the pre-seed round are Outlier Ventures, Web3.com Ventures, Moonhill Capital, Contango, as well as angels from Zero Gravity, Aethir, EigenLayer, Bagel, SwissBorg, and Particle Network.
The funds will be used by the team to develop and scale their platform for tokenizing AI models and to expand the team.
The startup has become one of the leaders in its niche with over 50 Small Language Models (SLMs) and more than 150,000 registered users on the platform. The valuation of the small AI model builder is $25 million.
Assisterr allows developers and creators to build their own niche AI models based on the infrastructure it is developing. The startup uses Small Language Models (SMLs) in its solution as they require less data and can operate on mobile devices, laptops, or small servers.
Currently, the company is working on expanding the categories of SLMs available on the platform and launching AI-lab—a no-code SLM module accessible to a broad range of users.
Assisterr has two founders: CEO Nik Gavrylyak, who has been working with Web3 and AI products since 2017, initially as a product manager and later focusing on business strategy and partnerships; and CTO Kelson Sheng—a full-stack and ML engineer with experience as a data analyst. Gavrylyak and Sheng met during the Entrepreneur First acceleration program in August 2022.
In February 2023, CPO Dmytro Dimenko joined them to enhance product design. He has relevant experience with web3 and B2C products.
