Highlights:

  • In the configuration phase, developers must identify which graphics cards a specific cloud provider offers most suitable for powering their artificial intelligence software.
  • Foundry plans to channel its recently revealed funding into product development endeavors to expand its installed base.

Foundry Technologies Inc., the company behind a cloud platform tailored for artificial intelligence tasks, debuted with a substantial USD 80 million in funding.

According to Fortune, the investment was spearheaded by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. Additional investors, such as Microsoft Corp.’s venture capital division, Google LLC’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Databricks Inc. Co-founder Matei Zaharia, also participated in the funding round, along with over a dozen others. Foundry’s current valuation stands at USD 350 million, marking a substantial increase of more than seven times from its reported valuation last year.

Establishing Foundry’s AI public cloud often demands considerable manual effort. In the configuration phase, developers must identify which graphics cards a specific cloud provider offers most suitable for powering their artificial intelligence software. Additionally, they need to estimate the required number of chips and develop custom code to orchestrate the workload of those chips.

Foundry asserts that its platform can streamline this process. “We’re building a new breed of public cloud, backed by an orchestration platform that makes accessing AI compute resources as easy as turning on the light,” Jared Quincy Davis, the CEO and creator of Foundry, stated in a blog post.

Foundry’s AI public cloud platform offers access to various types of instances. Some instances feature high-end chips like the H100, a graphics card with 80 billion transistors introduced by Nvidia Corp. in 2022. Other instances offer more limited compute capacity with hardware configurations focused on cost efficiency.

Foundry asserts that its cloud platform is well-suited for both artificial intelligence training and inference, facilitating the execution of neural networks in production post-training.
Per the company’s claims, customers can swiftly scale up or down the infrastructure in a deployment to align with their workload demands. According to Foundry, their platform is “often able to provide computing power at an order of magnitude lower costs than our users could access otherwise.”

The company’s value proposition is attracting substantial interest from the industry. According to Fortune, Foundry’s platform generates “more than eight figures” in revenue.
Its clientele includes LG Electronics Inc.’s AI research group, investment firm KKR, and several universities.

Foundry plans to channel its recently revealed funding into product development endeavors to expand its installed base. Additionally, the company will allocate some of the investment to establish more industry partnerships.

Foundry joins a series of AI infrastructure providers that have recently secured funding. Last month, Lambda Inc., a competitor of Foundry that operates a cloud platform tailored for AI workloads, secured USD 320 million at a valuation of USD 1.5 billion. AI Inc. reportedly raised over USD 100 million, while CoreWeave Inc. secured USD 2.3 billion in debt financing last year.