# Zyphra

> Zyphra is a superintelligence research and product company building efficient, open foundation models and a full-stack AI cloud. Best known for its SSM-hybrid Zamba models, the ZAYA1 reasoning family trained entirely on AMD hardware, and the Zonos text-to-speech system, Zyphra argues that frontier intelligence should run cheaply, locally, and outside the walled gardens of a handful of labs. In June 2025 it raised a $100M Series A at a $1B valuation led by Jaan Tallinn.

- **Founded:** 2020
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Krithik Puthalath (Co-Founder & CEO), Beren Millidge (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist), Tomas Figliolia (Co-Founder & Head of AI Model Architecture), Danny Martinelli (Co-Founder)
- **Team size:** ~36-62 employees
- **Products:** Zamba, ZAYA1, Zonos, Maia, Zyphra Cloud / Inference Cloud
- **Notable:** Reached a $1B valuation as a unicorn in its first institutional round (Series A, 2025)., Trained a frontier-class reasoning model (ZAYA1) entirely on AMD hardware, demonstrating a credible non-Nvidia training stack., ZAYA1-8B matches or exceeds much larger open models on reasoning, math, and coding with fewer than a billion active parameters.

## Products & services

- **Zamba** — An open SSM-hybrid foundation model family combining Mamba state-space blocks with a global shared attention layer, designed for low inference cost and on-device deployment. Includes Zamba2 and vision-language variants (Zamba2-VL).
- **ZAYA1** — A mixture-of-experts reasoning model family - including ZAYA1-8B - trained entirely on AMD Instinct MI300X clusters. With fewer than a billion active parameters it rivals far larger open models on math, code, and reasoning. Paired with Markovian RSA test-time compute and a diffusion-converted preview variant.
- **Zonos** — A pair of highly expressive open text-to-speech models with high-fidelity voice cloning, released under an Apache 2.0 license (transformer and hybrid 1.6B variants).
- **Maia** — A multiplayer general-agent assistant bringing long-horizon agents, search, and productivity tooling to enterprise teams.
- **Zyphra Cloud / Inference Cloud** — A full-stack AI platform built on AMD hardware for developers, enterprises, and hyperscalers, emphasizing data sovereignty, domain customization, and deployment without vendor lock-in.
- **Zyda datasets** — Open, large-scale pretraining datasets (Zyda, Zyda-2, dclm-dedup) used widely across the open-source ML community.

## Achievements

- Reached a $1B valuation as a unicorn in its first institutional round (Series A, 2025).
- Trained a frontier-class reasoning model (ZAYA1) entirely on AMD hardware, demonstrating a credible non-Nvidia training stack.
- ZAYA1-8B matches or exceeds much larger open models on reasoning, math, and coding with fewer than a billion active parameters.
- Released ZAYA1-8B-Diffusion-Preview, described as the first MoE diffusion model converted from an autoregressive LLM, with up to 7.7x speedup.
- Open Zyda datasets adopted broadly across the ML community with billions of cumulative downloads.
- Backed by Jaan Tallinn, an early investor in DeepMind and Anthropic.

## Latest updates

- **2026-05** — Released ZAYA1-8B, a reasoning MoE trained on AMD MI300X, plus the Markovian RSA test-time compute method.
- **2026-05** — Released ZAYA1-8B-Diffusion-Preview, an MoE diffusion model converted from an autoregressive LLM with up to 7.7x speedup.
- **2025-06** — Closed a $100M Series A at a $1B post-money valuation led by Jaan Tallinn, with AMD, Gaia, and AlphaJWC Ventures.

## Links

- Website: https://www.zyphra.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/zyphra
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ZyphraAI
- GitHub: https://github.com/Zyphra

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/zyphra
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-11