Foundry, a new type of public cloud for AI/ML workloads, announced $80 million in seed and Series A funding to orchestrate the world’s computing capacity and make it universally accessible and useful. Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners co-led the funding round, including Redpoint, Microsoft Ventures (M12), Conviction, NEA, and other technical minds.
Foundry, created by alumni from DeepMind’s core Deep Learning Team and Stanford’s CS PhD program (a group led by Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia), addresses the core economic and technical challenges in AI and deep learning. Some difficulties companies face today, like the widely mentioned GPU shortage and the underutilization of computing capacity, prevent them from effectively utilizing their computing resources.
But Foundry’s innovative methods solve these issues by providing scalable GPU instances with unmatched price-performance ratios. The early adopters range from large enterprises such as KKR and LG to prestigious academic institutions like Stanford and MIT and prominent AI startups through cluster partnerships with Lightspeed and Pear VC.
The funding round will enable Foundry to expand its operations, improve product offerings, and establish strategic partnerships. The company aims to create the ultimate AI/ML infrastructure platform that maximizes the use of computing for society’s benefit.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. What Jared and the team at Foundry are building is at the forefront of innovation in the world of public clouds for AI/ML workloads and will deeply influence the ecosystem for years to come.”
– Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital
“AI accelerator compute is arguably the most critical resource in civilization today, so the bottlenecks here reverberate broadly. 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.”
– Foundry’s founder and CEO Jared Quincy Davis
“Arc has very high performance infrastructure needs for computational biology, and Foundry delivers. Foundry manages to combine perfect uptime and compelling economics with exceptionally fast execution, which allows us to accelerate our development of state-of-the-art foundation models.”
– Alden Woodrow, COO of Arc Institute, a scientific research organization dedicated to the study of complex human disease
“The AI revolution has set off a global search for far greater computing power, and it’s only the beginning. Foundry is filling a huge gap by helping any company achieve flexibility and scalability in computing pricing and power to bring their AI products to scale and usher in the AI era.”
– Raviraj Jain, Partner at Lightspeed
