📝 Fastino raises $17.5M

Liam Gill
May 09, 2025

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Fastino, a Palo Alto startup, is rejecting the trillion-parameter AI arms race by building tiny, task-specific models that run on less than $100K worth of consumer GPUs—and it's catching investors' attention, with $17.5M in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. CEO Ash Lewis claims their lightweight models outperform industry giants on targeted enterprise tasks like redacting data or summarizing documents, delivering answers in milliseconds. While the crowded enterprise AI market already includes players like Anthropic, Cohere, and Mistral, Fastino is betting that smaller, faster, and cheaper will win, especially with a contrarian research team focused on practical impact over scale.

For higher education, “AI’s takeover [is] a full-blown existential crisis.”
“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.”
“I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating.”
“It isn’t
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79)
1:32 PM • May 7, 2025

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Liam Gill