A new kind of public cloud for AI/ML workloads called Foundry has announced $80 million in seed and Series A investment to organize global computational resources and make it usable to everyone. Along with participation from Redpoint, Microsoft Ventures (M12), Conviction, NEA, and other top technical and business experts in the field, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners co-led the round.
Stanford CS PhD program (under the direction of Matei Zaharia, co-founder of Databricks), Foundry addresses the fundamental technological and economic issues in AI and deep learning.
Companies nowadays would be unable to fully use their computational capabilities due to a number of issues, including the well-publicized GPU scarcity and the underutilization of compute capacity. These problems are being resolved by Foundry’s innovative approaches, which provide scalable GPU instances with the highest price-performance ratios. Large corporations like KKR and LG, esteemed educational institutions like Stanford and MIT, and well-known AI companies via cluster relationships with Lightspeed and Pear VC are just a few examples of early adopters.
“Building AI infrastructure is uniquely relevant right now and highly complex to build, requiring profound technical expertise in areas traditionally seen as separate, like; deep learning, distributed systems, the economics of energy, finance, as well as market theory and mechanism design,” said Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire, explaining why he led the seed and co-led the Series A rounds of Foundry. “The work that Jared and the Foundry team are doing is at the vanguard of innovation for AI/ML workloads on public clouds, and it will have a significant long-term impact on the ecosystem.”
AI Accelerator Compute
The mission of Foundry is to create the most advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning infrastructure platform that is currently available, with the intention of optimizing the use of computing power. With the funding, Foundry would be able to expand its company, broaden the variety of products it sells, and establish further strategic connections.
“The AI revolution has set off a global search for far greater computing power, and it’s only the beginning,” said Raviraj Jain, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “By assisting any business in achieving flexibility and scalability in computing pricing and power to bring their AI products to scale and usher in the AI era, Foundry is filling a huge gap.”
“AI accelerator compute is arguably the most critical resource in civilization today, so the bottlenecks here reverberate broadly,” said Foundry’s founder and CEO, Jared Quincy Davis. “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.”
