The minds behind viral photo apps Reface and Prisma are taking aim at one of AI's biggest infrastructure challenges. Mirai, a new startup focused on optimizing how AI models run directly on smartphones and laptops, just closed a $10 million seed round. The bet: as AI moves from the cloud to your pocket, the companies that solve the performance puzzle will power the next wave of intelligent devices.
The on-device AI revolution has a performance problem, and Mirai thinks it has the answer. The startup, founded by the entrepreneurial duo behind consumer hits Reface and Prisma, just secured $10 million in seed funding to build infrastructure that makes AI models run faster and more efficiently on smartphones, laptops, and other edge devices.
It's a pivot that makes sense when you look at where the AI market is headed. Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence across its entire product line. Google is embedding Gemini Nano directly into Pixel phones. Microsoft is racing to put AI into every Windows laptop with its Copilot+ PC initiative. But there's a catch - running sophisticated AI models on consumer hardware with limited power and processing capability is brutally difficult.
That's where Mirai comes in. The company is building tools that optimize model inference, the process of actually running AI models to generate predictions or outputs. According to the TechCrunch report, the team is leveraging their experience building consumer apps that processed millions of AI-powered photo and video transformations to tackle the infrastructure layer.
The founding team's track record is noteworthy. Reface, their face-swapping app, exploded to over 200 million downloads and became one of the most viral AI applications before the ChatGPT era. Prisma, their earlier venture, pioneered neural style transfer for mobile devices, turning photos into artworks using AI filters. Both apps ran into the same fundamental challenge - how do you deliver complex AI experiences without draining batteries or requiring cloud roundtrips that kill the user experience?
