Mernit is building an open-source, self-hostable alternative for running AI workloads on GPUs without managing servers.
Eli Mernit is co-founder and chief executive of Beam, an AI compute company in New York that lets developers deploy Python functions as GPU endpoints, sandboxes, and task queues.
Meeting Luke Lombardi in College
Mernit and Luke Lombardi were college roommates and have built products together since then, according to Y Combinator. The pair often competed at hackathons and built a serverless framework to ship web apps quickly to the cloud. Mernit's YC profile also lists him as a former competitive cyclist.
Joining Y Combinator in 2022
The two founded the company in 2021, first under the name Slai, and joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. When they started working with AI models they found no serverless framework that made deploying them easy, so they set out to build one, and the company later became Beam.
Competing With Bigger GPU Clouds
Beam sits in a market with larger, better-funded serverless GPU providers. Mernit has positioned it as fully open source and self-hostable, so teams can run it on Beam's cloud or on their own AWS, GCP, or bare-metal machines, with customers listed by YC including Coca-Cola and Magellan AI.
Personal Life
Mernit is based in New York. His partnership with Lombardi dates back to their college years, and the two still run Beam together.
