Cast AI raises $108M to get the most out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads

The crush of site visitors going into coaching and working AI has shortly become a serious price and useful resource headache for organizations. Right now, Cast AI, a startup constructing instruments to ease and optimize workloads for AI and different duties with automation, is elevating a serious spherical of funding on the again of robust progress and partnerships with main gamers within the house. 

The corporate has raised a $108 million Collection C that it will likely be utilizing each for extra R&D in addition to to develop its enterprise in core markets just like the U.S. and elsewhere. Sources acquainted with the deal instructed TechCrunch that the spherical has the corporate at “close to unicorn” valuation, post-money — near $900 million from what I perceive. 

“It’s all about GPU, compute and electrical energy,” stated Yuri Frayman, Solid’s CEO and co-founder. “Our play is to make sure that we create effectivity, to have the ability to promote extra workloads throughout GPUs. That’s what we’re about.”

For context, when Solid final raised capital, $35 million in November 2023, it was valued at $300 million post-money, per PitchBook. Previous to this newest spherical, the startup had raised simply over $86 million.

Solid AI relies out of Miami, Florida, however “is closely located in Europe” and Frayman describes it as “a European firm,” with most of its improvement accomplished in Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. 

It has amassed 2,100 prospects within the final three years of enterprise. Firms like Akamai, BMW, FICO, HuggingFace, NielsenIQ and Swisscom are amongst these utilizing its expertise to analyse cloud and on-premise capability and discover the optimum cost-performance ratio for distributing compute workloads throughout them. Frayman says it integrates with all main cloud suppliers and the rest {that a} buyer could also be utilizing. 

At a time the place corporations are dealing with a scarcity of processors to coach and run AI fashions, there’s a powerful want for higher useful resource allocation. Solid AI, citing its own research, claims that on common solely 10% of CPUs and 23% of reminiscence are utilized, and the identical extends to GPU utilization.

This Collection C — each in dimension and individuals — underscores what else the startup is engaged on, and whom else it’s working with.

G2 Enterprise Companions and SoftBank Imaginative and prescient Fund 2 are co-leading the spherical. Aglaé Ventures (LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault’s funding agency), and former backers Hedosophia, Cota Capital, Classic Funding Companions, Creandum, and Uncorrelated Ventures are additionally collaborating.  

Notably, Frayman identified that the oversubscribed spherical places the corporate in the identical portfolio secure as OpenAI and AI infrastructure supplier Crusoe Power — two corporations which are, with SoftBank, Oracle and others, engaged on the huge Stargate AI infrastructure challenge within the U.S.

Frayman stated his firm counts plenty of these corporations as companions and prospects already. “We’re partnering with Crusoe, the place we’re inside their stack, and we’re partnering with SoftBank to have the ability to facilitate the effectivity of their AI datacenters,” he stated, including that the startup can be a part of the big challenge between OpenAI and SoftBank to build services in Japan. “We’re partnering with all the ecosystem,” he added. 

Solid AI is speaking and doing rather a lot with AI as of late, however that was not the place the corporate bought its begin. Ukraine-born Frayman, who based the corporate with Leon Kuperman and Laurent Gil in 2019, began his profession in finance earlier than pivoting to software program improvement. 

Again in 2006, he and Gil constructed what Frayman described as one of many “earliest machine studying startups,” Viewdle. There, they constructed a number of the earliest purposes that used Nvidia GPUs to coach classifiers for picture searches. “That’s how far again we go by way of understanding the ability of machine studying,” he stated. 

That firm would ultimately get acquired by Google.

The three founders later labored on a cloud-based cybersecurity startup, Zenedge, which was the inspiration for Solid — they have been struggling to maintain cloud prices below management as they scaled up. (Zenedge was ultimately acquired by Oracle.)

The primary use case for Solid AI was born from their expertise with that useful resource wrestle. Whereas Solid has all the time had “AI” in its identify and ethos, it was about its utility, particularly making cloud use and allocation extra environment friendly for Kubernetes workloads.

Kubernetes purposes are nonetheless on the coronary heart of the startup, Frayman stated, each by way of income and ethos (in case you go to its web site, you’ll see distinguished messaging there, too). However it’s the surge of exercise round AI the place all the thrill and progress are flowing from — each prospects and buyers. 

“Solid AI is setting a brand new commonplace for cloud effectivity at a time when infrastructure calls for are surging,” stated Tim Yap, funding director at SoftBank Funding Advisers, in an announcement.

“Proper now on the earth, everyone seems to be speaking about AI brokers,” stated Carl Fritjofsson, common accomplice at Creandum. “Solid was an AI agent earlier than we began speaking about that expertise, you understand. They’ve simply been constructing the sort of automation for a very long time.”