Cerebral Valley Deep Dive

Today, we’re talking with Eshan Chordia, Co-founder and CEO of Lumino AI.

Lumino AI is a startup building open-source infrastructure to simplify training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models. Founded by Eshan and his co-founder Yogesh Darji in 2023, Lumino is designed to cut costs by sourcing GPUs directly from data centers, slashing training and inference costs by up to 80%. The team launched their first product, an LLM fine-tuning platform, in late-2024, and it has amassed over hundreds of users since its launch.

Today, Lumino is helping ML enthusiasts, researchers, and startups across industries like climate, legal, and fintech experiment faster, iterate better, and deploy AI into production with ease.

In this conversation, Eshan shares how Lumino got started, the technical challenges of building decentralized AI infrastructure, and how they’re helping everyone—from researchers to startups—build better AI.

Let’s dive in ⚡️

Our Chat with Eshan

Eshan - welcome to Cerebral Valley! First off, give us a bit about your background and what led you to start Lumino AI?

Excited to be here! My name is Eshan Chordia, and I’m the Co-founder and CEO of Lumino AI. A bit about my background: I started out in software engineering and UI/UX design right after college. Early in my career, I launched a consumer app called Nootry. It was all about helping people find healthy food at restaurants—something I personally needed at the time. I was in my mid-20s, eating out a lot, and trying to stay healthy as a vegetarian who just came back from the gym. I wanted an app that could tell me how to get enough protein and stay within my calorie goals.

After Nootry, I joined ZestyAI, where we built the world’s most advanced wildfire risk model. It could predict the probability of a house being destroyed by wildfire. I spent 3 years there working on wildfire risk, hail risk, and property analytics using AI. Our wildfire product was particularly impactful—it helped insurance companies reduce their exit rates from California, and reduce insurance rates for homeowners that fire-proofed their homes. All of this was powered by deep learning, computer vision, and NLP.

Right before starting Lumino, I also spent time at Protocol Labs. Protocol Labs was able to hire Google-level engineering talent, and built the best open source decentralized infrastructure in the world, which helped shape my perspective as I was thinking about Lumino. We built libp2p, a decentralized networking library used by Ethereum and other blockchains, as well as IPFS, a peer-to-peer content delivery network, and Filecoin, a decentralized storage system.

Throughout this journey, I was exposed to just how expensive compute is for AI workloads. At ZestyAI, we were on GCP, but we’d compare GPU prices across different public clouds to decide if it made sense to switch providers. We even had an Excel sheet listing all the GPUs GCP offered, the prices, and how long the models would take to run to balance cost versus performance.

That’s when I started looking into sourcing GPUs directly from data centers. Data centers were way cheaper than GCP or AWS because they don’t have the same overhead costs, but they also lack the software, managed services, virtualization, and other products that the public clouds provide. So it didn’t make sense at the time.

When I joined the Filecoin cryptoeconomics team at Protocol Labs in 2022, I saw how storage providers—over 4,000 of them—were buying hardware, setting it up in co-located data centers, and providing compute and storage to their ecosystem. That’s when it clicked for me: you could use this kind of business model to bootstrap compute supply for AI, which really helps with reducing cost.

I actually pitched this idea to Protocol Labs during my first week there, but we were focused on distributed compute frameworks at a lower level on the tech stack, and not specifically on machine learning and AI use cases at that time. They told me, “Maybe in the future.” A year later, I decided to take the plunge and start this company. That’s how the idea for Lumino AI really came together.

Click to read more: https://cerebralvalley.beehiiv.com/p/lumino-ai-your-open-source-ai-research-company

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