In The Arena by TechArena - AI on Your Desk with Uptime Industries’ Lemony

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Join Sascha Buehrle of Uptime Industries as he reveals how Lemony AI offers scalable, secure, on-premise solutions, speeding adoption of genAI.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name's Alison Klein. We're coming to you from AI Hardware Summit in the Bay Area this week. And I'm really delighted to have Sascha Burley, co-founder and chief technology officer of Uptime Industries with me. Sascha, welcome to the program.

Hi, nice to meet you. So this is the first time Uptime is on the show. Can you just give us a quick background about you and your background in tech? So I'm Sascha and I'm from Switzerland. I had a startup line with the MedTech field. So we did like software and IoT devices for meds. I joined Up Time two years ago. I met Ivan in Munich at JetBrains and that's how we started together.

Now you guys have been on a tear. I was doing some research for this podcast and you just formed a little while ago. You had a Kickstarter campaign. Can you share a little bit about the history and your vision for the company? Sure. Everything kicked off with a side project and we launched it on Kickstarter. It's basically a scalable compute plate server for Raspberry Pis and that went quite successful. So we got 1.2 million cut of project. And I said, it was just a side project. So we figured things out of why are people into it

and what they're using it for. And in the last week of the Kickstarter campaign, launched an AI module for it. So that's the report and server. And then we saw that the orders from companies increased dramatically. So we kicked into it and found out they really want to figure out if they can do something more premium, easy and cheap. And then we said, OK, that's enough information to kick off a second product line now called Lemony.

Now, Lemony is something that has gotten a lot of attention lately. And you're sure he's screaming Lemony at me. It's gained steam in the marketplace why an appliance for ai yes so we start for the need that at the moment it's just that that's starting with on-premise ai i privacy it's hard to get something in the data centers it takes a lot of investment and it also takes ages to get like the signature score so we said we want to push bi closer to the people and this is why we designed lemony that you can start on the desk with just one user and then you can scale

it by just bringing more lemony notes i love the edge application and i love exactly what you're talking about in terms of it evaluation of new technology taking forever. I want to dig in a little bit about enterprise adoption of Gen AI in general a bit. What do you think the guardrails are in terms of its broad proliferation and what do you hear from customers? Yeah, so that's a good question. In the beginning, when we brainstormed about Lemony, we also said it's hard to estimate what the customers really drives at the moment so we established an early access program where we easily found 150 great companies signing up for early access to the memory notes and there we learned a lot what they really want to do and what their barriers are at the moment

for the adoption it looks really like transparency in AI is not there in the cloud solutions, so that's a big barrier for them. And as I said, if they really go on-prem, they know that it takes too long and it's too expensive because it comes more out of the teams and it's not the company strategy yet. Yeah. Now you talked about desktop adoption. How is the team design Lemony to address the issues you talked about, as well as the unique environment of deploying desktop? Yeah. During our early access program with this first 150 organizations, we found out that the transparency and ownership is a big thing. So we just designed that at the core of Lemony so that you have always full

ownership of all your data, but also of all your AI models. And that it's as easy as possible to get started with generative AI. So in the case of Lemony, you just have to connect it to your laptop or bring it in your network and then you can use everything what is needed and it works directly out of the box. Now, you talked about AI models just a second ago, and you have a ton of information on your site about model support. What models can be run on Lemony and how have you worked with the industry to ensure optimal performance for your clients? Yeah, so we support most of the open source models and on one Lemony node, we can preload up to two models.

But by default, we always have the LAMA 3.1 70 billion parameter model preloaded because we see great results with it. And during our MVP test of the software side of things, we saw two different behaviors from the European market and the US market. For the European market, it was more important that everything works directly and there was no need that they need to know something about the models. It was more something new they had to learn. But in the US, it looks like everyone is really into it and knows about the models. So this is why we said, OK, we decide at the moment what model we preload for you, depending on the task you are doing.

Nice. Now, the box supports up to five users, but this is not just a small business product. In fact, you're working with a lot of large players in this space. Talk about scale and how you address this. Yeah, that's correct. So faster scalability and the easiness is the key driver of Lemony. So we said we want to start small. So with one Lemony node, we support up to five users, but you can add more and more Lemony nodes to your network and then we scale it up. So for example, with two Lemony nodes, we support up to 25 users and with three Lemony nodes, already 50 users.

That's amazing. And what use cases are you seeing targeted for Lemony? Yeah, during our MVP phase, the early access program, we gathered all the data and we identified as the low hanging fruit for us. It's basically working with the financial institutions, with legal firms, and also with some pharmaceutical research because we have everything ready, what they need and what they target at the moment. And the use cases are as long as you're working intensely with documents, which you are not

allowed to upload in the cloud, or you have some compliance policies in place, then this is the right tool to go with. Now, Sascha, I want you to talk me through a deployment. So I receive a Lemony box from you guys. I put it on my desk. I plug it in. What comes next? What do I need to do to get up and running? Yeah, so as next, you will see your IP address on your little screen on the Lemony node,

and then you just enter the IP address and then everything is ready to go. So everything runs directly in the box. So we're using microservices on the edge, so you don't have to download any application. And it guides you through the setup process and you have an administrative side of things and your user side of things. So you can manage your users, set up your prompt shields, organize your projects, and then you have full access to our advanced rack system, also to our AI agents and can start with your AI journey. And you talked about the fact that you're not pushing your data up into the cloud. It's very secure and private. How much data can be stored on a Lemony box? That's a good question.

So on one Lemony box, we can store up to 48 terabytes of data. Oh wow, that's good. And it scales up if you add more Lemony nodes to the network. That's fantastic. Now what comes next for Uptime? So next is, so we're getting a lot of information

from these first customers and we are looking into them. So what features to design next to be like a really true customer-centric product. And yeah, definitely a lot of new features will come on the software side. On the hardware side, we have not planned many new adoptions yet because we are super happy with our first version. And yeah, it will be strongly on the software stack. I love this product. I think it's so cool. When I think back around the initial substantiation of cloud computing, so many organizations looked to adopt cloud without engaging IT because of the slow process that

you're talking about. It's not surprising that that's the same case with AI. I think that the market adoption of this technology is going to be fantastic to track, and we will do that on the tech arena. But before we move off into the future, where can folks find out more about the solutions we talked about today and engage you and the team? Yeah, you can check out everything on lemony.ai, and you can also follow us on LinkedIn. There we post all the new and upcoming features and our upcoming partnerships. Fantastic, Sascha. Thank you so much for being here today. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by the Tech Arena.