Foundry Technologies Inc., the operator of a cloud platform optimized for artificial intelligence workloads, launched today with $80 million in funding.

Fortune reported that Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital led the investment. They were joined by more than a dozen other investors, including Microsoft Corp.’s venture capital arm, Google LLC Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and Databricks Inc. cofounder Matei Zaharia. Foundry is now worth $350 million, more than seven times the valuation it reportedly received last year.

Setting up a public cloud environment capable of running AI models can require a significant amount of manual work. During the configuration process, developers must determine which of the graphics cards a given cloud provider offers are best-suited to power their AI software. They must also estimate how many chips will be needed, as as well as create custom code to orchestrate those chips’ work.

Foundry says its platform can simplify the 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,” Foundry founder and Chief Executive Officer Jared Quincy Davis wrote in a blog post today.

The company’s platform provides access to several types of instances. Some feature high-end chips such as the H100, a graphic card with 80 billion transistors that Nvidia Corp. introduced in 2022. Other instances provide more limited compute capacity with hardware configurations that emphasize cost-efficiency.

Foundry says its cloud lends itself both to AI training and to inference, or the task of running neural networks in production after they’ve been trained. According to the company, customers can quickly increase or decrease the amount of infrastructure in a deployment based on workload requirements. Foundry says that its 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 drawing significant industry interest. Fortune reported that Foundry’s platform is generating “more than eight figures” in revenue. It counts LG Electronics Inc.’s AI research group, investment firm KKR and multiple universities as customers.

To grow its installed base, Foundry will invest its newly disclosed funding in product development initiatives. The company will also use a portion of the investment to establish more industry partnerships.

Foundry is the latest in a series of AI infrastructure providers to have raised funding recently. Lambda Inc., which operates a rival cloud platform optimized for AI workloads, nabbed $320 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last month. Anther market player, Together AI Inc., is reportedly seeking to raise more than $100 million, while CoreWeave Inc., secured $2.3 billion in debt financing last year. 

Photo: Unsplash