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.

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

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.

“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.”

Money continues to flow for AI

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

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.

Just last week, AI startup Together raised a $106 million round led by Salesforce Ventures 1 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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Illustration: Dom Guzman