📝 Luminal raises $5.3M

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Luminal has raised $5.3 million in seed funding, a bet led by Felicis Ventures — with Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and Ben Porterfield joining as angels — on co-founder Joe Fioti’s belief that the real bottleneck in modern computing isn’t hardware but the software layer developers rely on actually to use it. Founded by veterans of Intel, Apple, and Amazon and fresh out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch, the startup sells compute like Coreweave or Lambda. Still, it differentiates itself by optimizing the compiler layer — the often-overlooked bridge between written code and GPU hardware — to squeeze more performance out of whatever infrastructure customers already have. With Nvidia’s partially open-source CUDA ecosystem underpinning much of the industry and GPU scarcity still pushing demand for efficiency, Luminal is part of a rising wave of inference-optimization startups jostling against hyperscaler teams. Still, Fioti argues the expanding market for faster, cheaper model execution leaves ample room for a general-purpose compiler solution that can adapt across architectures.

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