Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that helps developers remove the bottlenecks in their machine learning training pipelines, today announced that it has raised a $7.8 million seed round. The round includes a total of 30 funds and angels, including the likes of Sequoia Capital India, Blackbird, Folklore and Skip Capital, as well as Y Combinator, Starburst Ventures and founders and engineers from companies like Cruise, Waymo, Open AI, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. The company, which was part of Y Combinator's Winter '22 batch, promises that its optimizations can speed up the training process by 10x to 1000x, depending on the model, pipeline and framework. As Strong Compute founder Ben Sands, who previously also co-founded AR company Meta, told me, the team has recently made some breakthroughs where it was able to take Nvidia's reference implementation, which its customer LayerJot used, to run 20 times faster. "That was a big win," Sands said.