After obtaining $80 million in seed and series A funding, former Google DeepMind scientists announced Foundry, a new cloud platform designed to make computation accessible for AI training.
The investment was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The money will be used by Foundry to forge strategic alliances and enhance its line of products.
Foundry, a Palo Alto, California-based company, has acquired hardware, such as Nvidia’s H100 and A100s, which users may use to develop and train artificial intelligence models.
The startup Foundry stated in a LinkedIn post that it aims to make accessing AI computing “as reliable and simple as flipping a light switch,” allowing users to scale up or decrease their hardware demands as needed.
Large cloud providers like as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud presently control access to powerful AI gear. Foundry seeks to cause a market disruption.
Foundry CEO and founder Jared Quincy Davis stated, “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.”
Davis was once a member of the deep learning group of DeepMind. Some employees of the Foundry had previously been in Matei Zaharia’s computer science Ph.D. program at Stanford, which went on to co-found Databricks.
Zaharia, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and angel investors including Google AI chief Jeff Dean and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all provided support to their new endeavor.