Arcee celebrates seed round & merger with mergekit

Just a few short months after exiting stealth, Arcee is off to the races – with TechCrunch announcing our seed round in January, which was quickly followed by our merger with mergekit. 

Details below on both of these huge developments, and congrats to our incredibly talented and hardworking team.

Seed Round
Our January seed round brought Arcee’s total funding to $5.5 million, with investors including Wndrco, Long Journey Ventures, and Flybridge. You can read the full report in TechCrunch, but here’s the TL;DR: 

• Arcee Founders Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz, and Brian Benedict all had first-hand experience with the reticence of enterprises to adopt GenAI due to security and transparency concerns.
• Arcee stands out from similar products when it comes to security and feasibility – with our end-to-end system for training and deploying GenAI models in a VPC.
• Arcee’s fine-tuning for domain-specific tasks is also superior to that of the competition. 
• Jesse Middleton of Flybridge calls Arcee a “unique standout player” in the GenAi market, in particular for our “industry-specific solutions… and early success landing multiple Global 2000 customers.”

Joining forces with mergekit 
Our February merger with mergekit signaled a major phase in our product development. By partnering with mergekit Founder Charles Goddard, we’re showing our commitment to being the leader in this novel technique for building robust language models in an efficient way. Here’s the complete rundown on how this merger came about, and below are some of the highlights:

• When our team started learning about model merging, they recognized that it would transform the world of LLMs.

•  They observed the growing popularity of an open source model merging toolkit called mergekit, and reached out to its creator Charles Goddard.

• Both sides agreed that joining forces made sense: Arcee and Charles share a deep commitment to the open source community, and model merging fits perfectly within Arcee’s Small Language Model (SLM) universe. 

• Charles joined our staff as a Senior Research Engineer, and Arcee is building out education and awareness around model merging – starting with daily content during what we’ve called March Merge Madness.

What’s next for Arcee & mergekit? 
Our journey towards providing enterprises with SLMs and cutting-edge model merging has just begun. Stay tuned to our blog, our LinkedIn, and our Twitter/X for the next developments, including the latest research papers from our team, upcoming talks, and tutorials by Charles and others!