Using Software for Sustainability Solutions

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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and tim Stenoveek on Bloomberg Radio Sounds of Bono the Edge and other members of You two, you know, wrapping up their residency at the Stay one hundred and sixty six foot tall two point three billion dollar orb in Las Vegas, known as the Sphere.

Carol, you and I talk about it all.

The time, Rewhind because we want to be there.

Catching the show. Needless say, we haven't made it yet. It's not looking so good, not yet, not yet.

You're still young.

Yeah, Well they're going to be done in a few days.

Well, there'll be somebody else there, that's true, all right. Well maybe the next best thing I guess to not getting there is getting some time with the company that's the official tech partner for you two, helping to enable the high def imagery. We're welcoming in our studio Jonathan Martin. He's the president of the data management provider WEKCA and as we said, he's here in studio.

Welcome, Welcome, thank you, great to be here.

Tell us about your company WEAKCA so WECA.

Is an AI native data platform that allows large AI environments to be built.

So it was a year and a half ago would you be talking about AI so much.

So we've been talking about AI for probably the last five years, but it does seem to be reasonably hit these days. So about two hundred and seventy five of the world's largest companies are using Wekker today, eleven out of the Fortune fifty, and one of those obviously was the sphere.

What are companies mostly using you for?

So they're using is for building very large scale data pipelines. So if you imagine the companies building these AI environments are deploying very large volumes of GPUs, thousands, tens of thousands of GPUs, and they want to be able to serve data very very quickly, very very scalably, very very efficiently to those GPUs to make sure that the GPUs

Okay, So privately held company privately company YEP raised a lot of money last year, raised one hundred and thirty five million dollars in a series defunding round what's the plan for going public or an exit here for these investors.

So we're really focused on building the next great data company to come out of Silicon Valley. I think we have an absolutely incredible opportunity ahead of us. As you said, AI is huge right now, but there are many, many other sectors You've been talking about some of them earlier this afternoon, like media and entertainment, life sciences, financial services that are reimagining themselves.

How do you see AI playing a role in what they're doing.

So, media and entertainment is leveraging AI massively. A lot of generative is being used for character development, backgrounding, sequencing, in between ing. So lots and lots of generative in media and entertainment.

So I get it with you too, right. You helped create the visuals around.

It, Yeah, so we completely did it. So two things. So we gave them the platform on which they could build those visuals. So you can imagine that that is a very very unique environment for sixteen K screens one hundred and sixty four thousand independent channels of audio. That's that's targeted three seats at a time. So the sound in there is absolutely beautiful, and they're streaming data about four hundred and two gigabytes a seconds.

Tell us about some other customers, like, I get that, but there's not a million spears.

There's not a million space.

But give us an idea of the kind of your typical customer and what they're doing with your we're doing with you with wekka, and what they're using what you provide.

Typically so many many other media and entertainment companies. So a lot of the shows that Union families watch. A lot of the broadcast studios in the sky are built on Wekka. But we're also very strong in things like financial.

Services broadcast studios in the sky.

So when they're building, so for example, if you want to go and build, if you've got you know, four or five studios around the world, they pull all of their content into into a cloud based studio. You have maybe another thousand or two thousand reporters out there with camera phones putting them all into the media base. So a lot of broadcast networks are building these studios in the sky where they're having people pull all the data into into a cloud built on Wekka, and then they're

Yes, Hey, I want to talk more about investors.

Use people like traditional networks, traditional news networks are not yet.

Checking.

All right, Well, you're in the building, so maybe it exactly introduce me to your friends.

So the other other investors include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HPE, Micron Ventures. You got Nvidio in here, you got Qualcom Ventures, Samsung. Are you using any of their hardware?

So we're software company, I know, but are you in terms of like developing this stuff? So, but we run as what we call reference architectures. So you can buy Wekka from HP, you can buy it from the you can buy it from Dell. You can buy it from super Micro.

What is it? What do you mean by that? Is it like white label?

So it's sold as a worker product and it's packaged with hardware from Dell or hpoper Micro. You can also buy the same product. And this is one of the things that's extremely unique about its absolutely the same product on any of your cloud marketplaces. So you can buy it on AWS or Google or Azure or OCI.

Who's the biggest competitor you're concerned about.

M honestly ignorance at the moment, Like a lot of people are just doing the same old, same old, same old. These AI workloads are very, very different. They require extreme performance, they require extreme scale, they require simplicity and shareability, and they require you to have the ability to build these pipelines across data centers and cloud environments.

A lot of extremes. And we've talked about this a lot, whether it's autonomous vehicles and so on and so forth, the use of energy and power to do all of this. How are you guys focusing on this and making we do it in a greener way?

So Sam Altman got on stage at Davos this year and said that the world doesn't appreciate the power requirements of AI and the AI revolution. That's absolutely what we see. So these GPUs, if you have a thousand GPUs, they consume about a megawatt of power. People are buying GPUs these times in tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, so massive, massive, massive power requirements. So there's a big focus on sustainability

So you talked about kind of news, you talked about entertainment. Where else is WEKA being used? Give me an idea.

Life sciences, so personal medicine, A lot of the MR and A vaccines were developed on wekka. So computational chemistry, structural biology, all of the FDA approvals we done on us. Again, because we can massively compress walclock time. What may may have taken you twelve days, we can now do in four hours.

We love numbers here at Bloomberg. You're a private company, but I'm going to look for some numbers here. We just heard from Salesforce CEO Mark Bennioff, who said he's excited about the all the spend going into it this year. How much have you seen spend go up for wekka?

So we are tripling each year and of triple for the last three years. Top line revenue, top line revenue.

They are, are you profitable?

We're a private company. That's okay.

You could tell us even if you're private, yes or no question.

So we're focused on growth right now. We're focused on growth.

Fascinating. I'm quite not quite sure way to go because I feel like I have a million questions, But having said that, we have a smart investment in audience. You're at least for the moment. But what is it I don't know whether it's your AI exposure or you're exposure to different industries. What is it that you think they can kind of take away from this conversation that we're having with you that you think that they should know.

About Probably the simplest way to think it doesn't have to be.

Company specific, but more broadly what you are seeing.

Yeah.

So, so, first of all, we are very very early in the AI revolution. We are you know, twenty twenty three really saw the early adopters in the market, grabbing training, grabbing in the world at large, the world at largest, it's very very very early early adoptors. Even geographically it's very very spotty. West coast of the US. AI is very very hot, East coast not so much. You go to Dubai, you go to Saudi, you go to q eight incredible investment, You go to Taiwan, you go to Singapore,

Just got about fifteen seconds.

Yeah, super super early. So the best way to think about Weka really is in AI AI environments. Wekka is to data what Nvidia is to compute.

Very interesting. Come back soon and keep us updated. Jonathan Martin, he's preident of Weka joining us here in studio