Fastino exits stealth with $7M pre-seed backing From Microsoft and Insight Partners

We’re thrilled to step out of stealth and officially introduce Fastino to the world. We are also excited to announce our $7M pre-seed funding round led by M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and Insight Partners.

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OUR MISSION

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At Fastino, our mission is simple: enable developers everywhere to do more with AI. We are building a family of developer-first LLMs that are more accurate, faster, and safer.

Fastino was born out of frustration—as developers and AI practitioners, we’ve struggled with:

• Opaque APIs

• The constant race for GPU resources

• Generalized models that require endless prompting

• Unpredictable results and lack of cost control

We knew there had to be a better way.

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A NEW ERA OF AI DEVELOPERS

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This is why we’re building Fastino—a family of task-optimized language models and tools designed for enterprise flexibility and control.

• Industry-leading accuracy for tasks like:

• Question answering (RAG)

• Textual data structuring

• Text/document summarization

• Smart replies

• Up to 1000x faster than traditional models

• Lower compute requirements

• Deploy anywhere—from commodity CPUs to your virtual private cloud

• Intuitive developer tools for fine-tuning & validation

• Consistent and predictable costs

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WORLD CLASS TEAM

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To bring this vision to life, we’ve assembled an exceptional team led by our co-founders Ash Lewis and George Hurn-Maloney, alongside top AI researchers and developers from Stanford, Oxford, Berkeley, Microsoft, and Google. We share a commitment to pushing boundaries and delivering real value in AI.

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BACKED BY

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With the support of world-class investors, we’re just getting started.

Fastino’s $7M pre-seed round was led by Microsoft and Insight Partners, with additional backing from NEA, CRV, Valor, and notable angels including:

• Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub

• Executives from Google

“I’m excited to be an early investor in Fastino, a company on a mission to bring the world accurate, fast, and safe task-specific LLMs that solve organizations’ most pressing challenges. Their novel approach involves a new architecture that runs on CPUs, making AI more accessible for a future with 1B developers.”

— Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub

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JOIN US

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Want to learn more?

• Join the waitlist to be part of our private alpha and see Fastino in action.

• Explore career opportunities to join our team and help shape the future of enterprise LLMs.

The future of developer-first AI starts now. Let’s build it together.

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