AI infrastructure

Flower

Website
Founded 2023Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Flower Labs is the world-class AI startup behind Flower, the most popular open-source framework and ecosystem in the world for training AI on distributed data and compute resources using federated learning. Trusted by industry leaders such as Mozilla, Banking Circle, Samsung, Temenos and Bosch, Flower empowers organizations to improve their AI models on sensitive data that remains securely distributed across organizational silos or user devices. In a world where most AI relies on centralized public datasets - just a fraction of the data available - we believe unlocking access to (orders of magnitude more) private data will drive the next breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Flower Labs is a Y Combinator (YCW23) graduate and backed by top-tier investors and renowned angels, including Felicis, First Spark Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, GitHub Co-Founder Scott Chacon, Factorial Capital, Betaworks, and Pioneer Fund. Together, we are redefining how AI is built, deployed, and scaled for privacy, collaboration, and real-world impact.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn
AI infrastructureInfrastructureBusinessesEnterpriseOpen source commercial

Founders & team

Previously Adap, Flower Labs

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

Daniel J. Beutel

Founder

Daniel is one of the creators of Flower, the first fully agnostic federated learning framework, which is now being used at many Fortune 500 companies and most top universities worldwide. He previously held roles as Head of AI and CTO and has considerable experience in running and scaling engineering teams. Daniel is a CS PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and has an MSc (with distinction) in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Nic Lane

Founder

Nic Lane is a co-founder of Flower Labs, and has been working on Flower since its creation. Nic is also a full Professor in Machine Learning Systems at the University of Cambridge . Previously, he has been on the faculty of Oxford and UCL. Nic additionally has 12-years experience in industrial research (including Microsoft Research and Nokia Bell Labs). Most recently as co-founder and Head of the Samsung AI Center in Cambridge; a 50-staff AI lab started in 2018.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Taner Topal

Founder

Taner is one of the creators of Flower, the first fully agnostic federated learning framework, which is now being used at many Fortune 500 companies and most top universities worldwide. He previously held roles as Head of Engineering and CTO in two prior startups. Some companies using products he helped build include Porsche, Lufthansa, and Vattenfall. Taner is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
20team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2023 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedRemote
Pricing evidenceA pricing page was detected
Maturity: Not assessed · 4 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yearpricing page observeddocumentation observed
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method