Reka Hits Unicorn Status With Backing From NVIDIA, Snowflake

Backed by Nvidia and Snowflake, Reka is scaling its next-gen foundation models with a focus on efficiency over size

In just over a year, Reka has gone from a 20-person team to a billion-dollar valuation, tripling its worth with a new $110 million funding round backed by Nvidia and Snowflake. At a time when investor attention is tilting toward lean, fast-moving AI companies outside the orbit of Big Tech, Reka’s ascent has positioned it as one of the few independent challengers to entrenched players like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic.

Founded in 2022 by former researchers from Google Brain and Meta’s AI labs, Reka was built on the premise that smaller, more efficient models, not necessarily the largest or most expensive, would define the next phase of AI. “Very few teams in the world have the capability to build what they’ve built,” said Snowflake’s VP of AI Engineering Vivek Raghunathan to Bloomberg. “Almost everyone at that level of talent is at OpenAI, Meta or Anthropic. Reka is one of the rare independents, and they’ve proven they can compete.”

Efficient Foundations, Multimodal Reach

The cornerstone of Reka’s product line is Reka Flash, a 21-billion parameter multimodal model trained to process video, images, text, and audio. Reka has prioritized optimization, both in training and inference. The company says their quantization library, Reka Quant, enables near-lossless compression of its models to 3.5-bit precision, making them viable in resource-constrained settings such as edge devices.