Foundry Emerges From Stealth With $80M For Purpose-Built AI Cloud

Foundry came out of stealth with a fresh $80 million to help companies harness the power of AI.

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The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Redpoint, Microsoft Ventures (M12), Conviction, NEA and others. The round was at a reported $350 million valuation

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The Palo Alto, California-based startup is developing a public cloud purpose-built for ML workloads. The company says its mission is to “ensure humanity maximizes the utility of the computing power we already have, and will produce” — as compute becomes harder and more expensive for many companies trying to embrace the AI revolution.

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“AI accelerator compute is arguably the most critical resource in civilization today, so the bottlenecks here reverberate broadly,” said founder and CEO Jared Quincy Davis, a former DeepMind employee, in a statement. “While the much-discussed GPU shortage is part of the challenge we face, it’s not the only issue. Arguably, the industry suffers vastly more from under-utilization than from under-supply. The work we are doing at Foundry is addressing this from multiple angles.”

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Money continues to flow for AI

Despite some predictions of a funding slowdown this year, the AI industry has held relatively strong.

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While it seems unlikely to hit the $50 billion mark it did last year, the space has already seen more than $10 billion flow into it this year from investors, per Crunchbase data.

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Just last week, AI startup Together raised a $106 million round led by Salesforce Ventures

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that doubled its valuation to $1.25 billion. The Menlo Park, California-based company has developed a cloud platform to allow developers to build on open and custom AI models — allowing customers to fine-tune open source foundation models.

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Reference: https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/foundry-ai-cloud-startup-funding/