Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and tim
Speaker 2: Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio Sounds of Bono the Edge and
Speaker 2: other members of You two, you know, wrapping up their
Speaker 2: residency at the Stay one hundred and sixty six foot
Speaker 2: tall two point three billion dollar orb in Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: known as the Sphere.
Speaker 3: Carol, you and I talk about it all.
Speaker 1: The time, Rewhind because we want to be there.
Speaker 2: Catching the show. Needless say, we haven't made it yet.
Speaker 2: It's not looking so good, not yet, not yet.
Speaker 1: You're still young.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well they're going to be done in a few days.
Speaker 1: Well, there'll be somebody else there, that's true, all right.
Speaker 1: Well maybe the next best thing I guess to not
Speaker 1: getting there is getting some time with the company that's
Speaker 1: the official tech partner for you two, helping to enable
Speaker 1: the high def imagery. We're welcoming in our studio Jonathan Martin.
Speaker 1: He's the president of the data management provider WEKCA and
Speaker 1: as we said, he's here in studio.
Speaker 4: Welcome, Welcome, thank you, great to be here.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your company WEAKCA so WECA.
Speaker 4: Is an AI native data platform that allows large AI
Speaker 4: environments to be built.
Speaker 1: So it was a year and a half ago would
Speaker 1: you be talking about AI so much.
Speaker 4: So we've been talking about AI for probably the last
Speaker 4: five years, but it does seem to be reasonably hit
Speaker 4: these days. So about two hundred and seventy five of
Speaker 4: the world's largest companies are using Wekker today, eleven out
Speaker 4: of the Fortune fifty, and one of those obviously was
Speaker 4: the sphere.
Speaker 1: What are companies mostly using you for?
Speaker 4: So they're using is for building very large scale data pipelines.
Speaker 4: So if you imagine the companies building these AI environments
Speaker 4: are deploying very large volumes of GPUs, thousands, tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of GPUs, and they want to be able to
Speaker 4: serve data very very quickly, very very scalably, very very
Speaker 4: efficiently to those GPUs to make sure that the GPUs
Speaker 4: are running as fast as they can. So typically when
Speaker 4: they deploy Wekka, they'll see that things like training times
Speaker 4: for AI on the models will shrink, you know, anywhere
Speaker 4: from ten to one hundred times. If you can imagine
Speaker 4: what you could do with one hundred times more in
Speaker 4: a day, it's a pretty incredible impact.
Speaker 2: Okay, So privately held company privately company YEP raised a
Speaker 2: lot of money last year, raised one hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: five million dollars in a series defunding round what's the
Speaker 2: plan for going public or an exit here for these investors.
Speaker 4: So we're really focused on building the next great data
Speaker 4: company to come out of Silicon Valley. I think we
Speaker 4: have an absolutely incredible opportunity ahead of us. As you said,
Speaker 4: AI is huge right now, but there are many, many
Speaker 4: other sectors You've been talking about some of them earlier
Speaker 4: this afternoon, like media and entertainment, life sciences, financial services
Speaker 4: that are reimagining themselves.
Speaker 3: How do you see AI playing a role in what
Speaker 3: they're doing.
Speaker 4: So, media and entertainment is leveraging AI massively. A lot
Speaker 4: of generative is being used for character development, backgrounding, sequencing,
Speaker 4: in between ing. So lots and lots of generative in
Speaker 4: media and entertainment.
Speaker 1: So I get it with you too, right. You helped
Speaker 1: create the visuals around.
Speaker 4: It, Yeah, so we completely did it. So two things.
Speaker 4: So we gave them the platform on which they could
Speaker 4: build those visuals. So you can imagine that that is
Speaker 4: a very very unique environment for sixteen K screens one
Speaker 4: hundred and sixty four thousand independent channels of audio. That's
Speaker 4: that's targeted three seats at a time. So the sound
Speaker 4: in there is absolutely beautiful, and they're streaming data about
Speaker 4: four hundred and two gigabytes a seconds.
Speaker 1: Tell us about some other customers, like, I get that,
Speaker 1: but there's not a million spears.
Speaker 4: There's not a million space.
Speaker 1: But give us an idea of the kind of your
Speaker 1: typical customer and what they're doing with your we're doing
Speaker 1: with you with wekka, and what they're using what you provide.
Speaker 4: Typically so many many other media and entertainment companies. So
Speaker 4: a lot of the shows that Union families watch. A
Speaker 4: lot of the broadcast studios in the sky are built
Speaker 4: on Wekka. But we're also very strong in things like financial.
Speaker 1: Services broadcast studios in the sky.
Speaker 4: So when they're building, so for example, if you want
Speaker 4: to go and build, if you've got you know, four
Speaker 4: or five studios around the world, they pull all of
Speaker 4: their content into into a cloud based studio. You have
Speaker 4: maybe another thousand or two thousand reporters out there with
Speaker 4: camera phones putting them all into the media base. So
Speaker 4: a lot of broadcast networks are building these studios in
Speaker 4: the sky where they're having people pull all the data
Speaker 4: into into a cloud built on Wekka, and then they're
Speaker 4: having the producers and everybody pull from those streams. Not
Speaker 4: one like people people who you will definitely know.
Speaker 3: Yes, Hey, I want to talk more about investors.
Speaker 1: Use people like traditional networks, traditional news networks are not yet.
Speaker 3: Checking.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, you're in the building, so maybe it
Speaker 4: exactly introduce me to your friends.
Speaker 2: So the other other investors include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE,
Speaker 2: Micron Ventures. You got Nvidio in here, you got Qualcom Ventures, Samsung.
Speaker 2: Are you using any of their hardware?
Speaker 4: So we're software company, I know, but are you in
Speaker 4: terms of like developing this stuff? So, but we run
Speaker 4: as what we call reference architectures. So you can buy
Speaker 4: Wekka from HP, you can buy it from the you
Speaker 4: can buy it from Dell. You can buy it from
Speaker 4: super Micro.
Speaker 3: What is it? What do you mean by that? Is
Speaker 3: it like white label?
Speaker 4: So it's sold as a worker product and it's packaged
Speaker 4: with hardware from Dell or hpoper Micro. You can also
Speaker 4: buy the same product. And this is one of the
Speaker 4: things that's extremely unique about its absolutely the same product
Speaker 4: on any of your cloud marketplaces. So you can buy
Speaker 4: it on AWS or Google or Azure or OCI.
Speaker 3: Who's the biggest competitor you're concerned about.
Speaker 4: M honestly ignorance at the moment, Like a lot of
Speaker 4: people are just doing the same old, same old, same old.
Speaker 4: These AI workloads are very, very different. They require extreme performance,
Speaker 4: they require extreme scale, they require simplicity and shareability, and
Speaker 4: they require you to have the ability to build these
Speaker 4: pipelines across data centers and cloud environments.
Speaker 1: A lot of extremes. And we've talked about this a lot,
Speaker 1: whether it's autonomous vehicles and so on and so forth,
Speaker 1: the use of energy and power to do all of this.
Speaker 1: How are you guys focusing on this and making we
Speaker 1: do it in a greener way?
Speaker 4: So Sam Altman got on stage at Davos this year
Speaker 4: and said that the world doesn't appreciate the power requirements
Speaker 4: of AI and the AI revolution. That's absolutely what we see.
Speaker 4: So these GPUs, if you have a thousand GPUs, they
Speaker 4: consume about a megawatt of power. People are buying GPUs
Speaker 4: these times in tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, so massive, massive,
Speaker 4: massive power requirements. So there's a big focus on sustainability
Speaker 4: and how do we do this in a greener way. Interestingly,
Speaker 4: our the series D that you mentioned was led by
Speaker 4: Al Gore's fund, which is the Generation Investment Management Fund.
Speaker 4: We were the second investment out of their Green Data
Speaker 4: Fund because we help organizations massively reduce the amount of
Speaker 4: infrastructury they require to get the same result. So typically
Speaker 4: for every petabyte of wekka that you buy, you save
Speaker 4: about two hundred and sixty tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Speaker 4: When we're talking about environments that are hundreds of petabytes
Speaker 4: breaking into exobytes. Tho's on massive savings.
Speaker 1: So you talked about kind of news, you talked about entertainment.
Speaker 1: Where else is WEKA being used? Give me an idea.
Speaker 4: Life sciences, so personal medicine, A lot of the MR
Speaker 4: and A vaccines were developed on wekka. So computational chemistry,
Speaker 4: structural biology, all of the FDA approvals we done on us. Again,
Speaker 4: because we can massively compress walclock time. What may may
Speaker 4: have taken you twelve days, we can now do in
Speaker 4: four hours.
Speaker 2: We love numbers here at Bloomberg. You're a private company,
Speaker 2: but I'm going to look for some numbers here. We
Speaker 2: just heard from Salesforce CEO Mark Bennioff, who said he's
Speaker 2: excited about the all the spend going into it this year.
Speaker 2: How much have you seen spend go up for wekka?
Speaker 4: So we are tripling each year and of triple for
Speaker 4: the last three years. Top line revenue, top line revenue.
Speaker 3: They are, are you profitable?
Speaker 4: We're a private company. That's okay.
Speaker 1: You could tell us even if you're private, yes or
Speaker 1: no question.
Speaker 4: So we're focused on growth right now. We're focused on growth.
Speaker 1: Fascinating. I'm quite not quite sure way to go because
Speaker 1: I feel like I have a million questions, But having
Speaker 1: said that, we have a smart investment in audience. You're
Speaker 1: at least for the moment. But what is it I
Speaker 1: don't know whether it's your AI exposure or you're exposure
Speaker 1: to different industries. What is it that you think they
Speaker 1: can kind of take away from this conversation that we're
Speaker 1: having with you that you think that they should know.
Speaker 4: About Probably the simplest way to think it doesn't have
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 1: Company specific, but more broadly what you are seeing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, so, first of all, we are very very early
Speaker 4: in the AI revolution. We are you know, twenty twenty
Speaker 4: three really saw the early adopters in the market, grabbing training,
Speaker 4: grabbing in the world at large, the world at largest,
Speaker 4: it's very very very early early adoptors. Even geographically it's
Speaker 4: very very spotty. West coast of the US. AI is
Speaker 4: very very hot, East coast not so much. You go
Speaker 4: to Dubai, you go to Saudi, you go to q
Speaker 4: eight incredible investment, You go to Taiwan, you go to Singapore,
Speaker 4: you go to Korea. Incredibly AI in AI and AI
Speaker 4: and not just not just AI, in all the infrastructure
Speaker 4: to build an AI industry. So you go to Saudi,
Speaker 4: they're building dozens of universities to churn out AI graduates.
Speaker 4: So it's government level investment in the infrastructure. There is
Speaker 4: the market or the market is.
Speaker 1: Just got about fifteen seconds.
Speaker 4: Yeah, super super early. So the best way to think
Speaker 4: about Weka really is in AI AI environments. Wekka is
Speaker 4: to data what Nvidia is to compute.
Speaker 1: Very interesting. Come back soon and keep us updated. Jonathan Martin,
Speaker 1: he's preident of Weka joining us here in studio