Lightning AI, the creator of the PyTorch Lightning framework, announced a $50 million equity investment from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, and NVIDIA, bringing the total funding to $103 million.
Since launching a year ago, Lightning AI has gained 240,000 users across 2,000 organizations, with PyTorch Lightning surpassing 160 million downloads. Lightning’s multiplayer, cloud-based, persistent development environments make AI development – model finetuning, deploying, agent building, etc – as intuitive as using the iPhone. And Lightning frees enterprises and developers from the burden and expense of building complex platforms while still integrating with all their favorite ML tools like Open AI, VSCode and many others.
Lightning also provides pay-as-you-go pricing, with a free tier that includes 22 GPU hours per month and enterprise options to deploy on private clouds with SOC2, HIPAA, etc.
Among its many customer success stories, Lightning AI recently helped a large company cut infrastructure setup time from 30 days to two and enabled Columbia researchers to finish hundreds of experiments in 12 hours instead of 60 days.
Enterprises have been struggling with fragmented and in-house ML infrastructure requiring teams of engineers to maintain, which quickly becomes outdated. And Lightning AI eliminates this complexity by unifying dozens of separate tools into one multi-cloud platform, offering full, low-, and no-code solutions to train and deploy models, build intelligent agents, code together on cloud GPUs, host AI apps, etc., all securely on enterprises’ preferred cloud infrastructure.
All of this is delivered in a seamless, user-friendly experience loved by 240K+ AI developers, and powered by NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, including H100s. And Lightning enables organizations to build and deploy AI in weeks not months, helping organizations iterate quickly despite a daily changing AI landscape.
Lightning AI proves that standardized solutions could be adaptable and scalable while retaining the flexibility of custom platforms. With 160+ million downloads, PyTorch Lightning has shown that simplicity and flexibility can coexist, overcoming developer skepticism.
KEY QUOTES:
“Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack—it’s complex, costly, and not core to your business. The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge, and unique models—not in maintaining AI infrastructure.”
“We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning.”
– William Falcon, Founder and CEO of Lightning AI
