Cast AI Group Inc., a six-year-old startup that specializes in optimizing the efficiency of cloud-native environments, today said it raised $108 million in a Series C round that brings its total funding to $181 million.

Two blue-chip investors led the funding: G2 Venture Partners LLC and SB Global Advisers Limited’s SoftBank Vision Fund 2. SoftBank is one of the world’s largest venture investors, and G2 was founded by four former Kleiner Perkins LLC senior partners. It specializes in sustainable technology.

Cast AI said the funding provides a “substantial valuation step-up,” without specifics. In an interview, Chief Executive Laurent Gill said the investment puts his company at “almost unicorn valuation,” referring to the term used for companies that achieve a value of $1 billion.

Cast AI said the funding comes as the company has reached hypergrowth, doubling its customer base between 2023 and 2024 and totaling 2,100 organizations today. Equally important is that the newest customers are some of the world’s largest companies.

“It’s not just that we doubled the customer base, but our customers became much bigger,” Gill said. “This took us by storm.”

Cast AI specializes in automating deployments of the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers. Its technology optimizes the use of cloud infrastructure to drive up utilization rates. Humans can’t keep up with constantly changing prices and configurations, so they tend to over-provision out of caution. The results is wasted money.

Automated cloud management

Cast AI’s published benchmarks estimate that average cloud CPU and memory utilization are just 10% and 23%, respectively, and that about 60% of cloud instances overprovision memory. Cast AI says its automation can usually cut cloud bills in half.

Its technology takes automated actions to optimize cost, security and speed on any cloud platform. “Our goal in life is not to show you where you spend money; it is to fully automate the management of applications to make them more efficient,” Gill said.

In November, the company introduced AI Enabler, a tool that leverages Kubernetes to intelligently route queries to the most efficient large language models. Gill said the feature is aimed at AI inferencing, or the the deployment of trained AI models, which require access to amounts of graphics processing unit power. Despite their high cost, GPUs are typically used at only about 30% of their full capacity.

“We optimize use because we know where and when GPUs are available,” Gill said. “We know where they are available as spot Instances and can move to those places almost in real time.” CastAI claims it can reduce the cost of GPU-intensive workloads between three- and 10-fold by using an artificial intelligence agent that is “obsessed with GPUs.”

Gill said the recently released feature has been a hit with large companies. “We don’t have a Fortune 500 customer company that isn’t using our product for managing GPUs,” he said.

This will probably be Cast AI’s last funding round, the CEO said. “We could be profitable today if we wanted,” he said. “We have healthy margins and numbers.”

Other funding participants include Aglaé Management SAS, Cota Capital Management LLC, Hedosophia Services Ltd., Creandum AB and Vintage Ventures Management Ltd.

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