Inephany

Inephany was founded in July 2024 in London by Dr. John Torr, Hami Bahraynian, and Maurice von Sturm — a team with deep roots in AI optimisation and conversational AI, previously co-founding the NLP startup Wluper together. The company was created to address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in AI development: the soaring compute and energy cost of training neural networks, including large language models. As next-generation models approach billion-dollar training budgets, Inephany set out to make the training process itself dramatically more efficient.

The company's platform introduces an AI-driven optimisation system that controls the training process in real time, replacing the brute-force trial-and-error approaches that dominate current practice. By improving sample efficiency and accelerating training, Inephany's technology reduces overall development time and compute costs by an estimated tenfold — making advanced AI development more accessible and sustainable. The platform's applicability extends beyond LLMs to recurrent neural networks for financial time-series forecasting, convolutional neural networks for computer vision, and inference-time compute optimisation.

Inephany raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Sure Valley Ventures and Professor Steve Young — the AI pioneer behind foundational speech recognition systems including Apple's Siri, who joined as company chair. The funding is being used to grow the engineering team, advance the platform, and onboard its first enterprise customers.