Moondream, a startup backed by Felicis Ventures, Microsoft’s M12 GitHub Fund, and Ascend, has emerged from stealth with $4.5 million in pre-seed funding. According to VentureBeat’s Michael Nuñez, the company has developed an open-source vision-language model that boasts 1.6 billion parameters but matches the performance of models four times its size. The model, which can run on devices ranging from smartphones to industrial equipment, addresses the high costs and privacy concerns associated with cloud computing for enterprise AI. Moondream’s technology has already been adopted for applications such as retail inventory management, vehicle inspections, and manufacturing quality control.