Atlanta, Chicago & Silicon Valley Investors Back Adviser Labs, A Startup Reimagining Compute-Intensive Workloads

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Cloud computing can be a big problem for startups, researchers, and engineering teams, says Krish Wadhwani.

The reality is that today, many industries need access to big compute capabilities to run their complex code. That has traditionally has meant needing a strong background in DevOps workflows.

But it doesn’t have to be that way in our AI Age, Wadhwani told Hypepotamus.

“You shouldn't have to be a cloud engineer to run code at scale,” says Wadhwani, CEO at Atlanta’s Adviser Labs.

Adviser, a startup spun out of Vanderbilt University, lets teams access cloud resources without traditional DevOps complexity, manual infrastructure setup, or constant cost tuning.

With a single command, “adviser run,” users can launch simulations, train AI/ML models, and process massive datasets, without needing deep cloud expertise in order to run larger clusters. This means that users don’t have to “go out and learn all these DevOps skills that ultimately aren't related and fundamental to their core job,” Wadhwani said.

Like cloud providers out on the market, Adviser Labs’ customers pay through a usage-based billing model.

Early target customers include those in quantitative finance, and the startup has already secured what they describe as a “major deal” with a leading proprietary trading firm in Chicago and New York, which helps quantitative researchers optimize trading simulations and options pricing models.

Wadhwani added that Adviser is useful for those training AI models and “domain experts across biotech, material sciences, energy, as well as academia,” who all deal with compute-related bottlenecks.

Behind The Pre-Seed Funding Round

The Adviser Labs team recently raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to build out its product.

Investors in the pre-seed round include Atlanta-based Drive Capital, Chicago-based Simplex Ventures, and Menlo Park-based Unusual Ventures. A group of other operators and angel investors, including early DoorDash employees, also joined the round.

Following the fundraise, Wadhwani (who previously worked at Astranis Space Technologies and social media giant TikTok) said that the Adviser team will be “heads down” building and talking to early adopters. “We're mostly focused on speaking to people who view big compute as a big problem in their daily workflows. The biggest needs for us are being more tapped into the community here. We want to speak to more people who are passionate about high performance computing and feel bottlenecked by DevOps workflows and inefficiencies.

To other early-stage founders on the fundraising circuit, Wadhwani offered the advice to focus on highlighting “user desperation” for a product over showing off the “perfect business model.”

Adviser's early employees are dispersed around the country. But the team spent the summer together building in Atlanta inside Drive Capital’s office in the Midtown neighborhood. Wadhwani, who grew up in Metro Atlanta, said that Atlanta will continue to be central to Adviser’s growth.

“We’re proud to be building this in Atlanta,” he added. “Companies spend millions and countless hours managing infrastructure instead of innovating. Adviser removes that overhead so teams can move faster. We’re looking to support companies and institutions in Atlanta who are bottlenecked by DevOps inefficiencies.”

--Photos provided by Adviser Labs