Foundry Technologies, a new cloud platform, launched this week out of stealth with $80 million of funding.
In a LinkedIn post, Foundry said it had received seed and series A funding to launch its public cloud platform capable of running AI models.
Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the funding. They were joined by other investors including Microsoft's venture capital arm, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, OpenAI’s Liam Fedus, and Databricks cofounder Matei Zaharia, who is also part of the Foundry.
Jared Quincy Davis, CEO and founder of Foundry, was formerly a research scientist at Google’s DeepMind deep learning team. He and Zaharia are joined by other DeepMind alumni, as well as scientists from Stanford University’s computer science PhD program.
In a blog post, Davis said: “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.”
The company says it is using high-performance data center GPUs, such as Nvidia H100s, and a suite of other smaller variants. It says users can scale up and down as needed, but hasn't revealed where its infrastructure will be hosted.
In addition, the company says its platforms have been built to the 'highest security standards' and are SOC 2 Type II certified.
Foundry – not to be confused with the media company previously known as IDG – is now valued at $350 million. The company says its focus is on providing companies with availability, elasticity, price performance, simplicity, security, and resiliency.
Venture capital firm Lightspeed was lead investor in the funding round, and said in its blog post that price-performant GPU power demands will rise as AI scales up and companies will need AI to make predictions in real-time.
Lightspeed added: “Make no mistake: Foundry is a long-term play that will ultimately take a significant bite out of the extremely fast-growing $270 billion cloud computing business dominated by the big three [cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud].”
Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, said on the company’s blog: “We are proud to partner with Jared not just because he’s building a desperately needed solution to a fast-growing problem, and not just due to his impressive background, but because of who he is.”
Maguire added that CEO Davis is a combination of "grit, distance traveled, and irrational motivation."
Quincy Davis started building Foundry in 2022 when he recognized the need for a cloud computing service provider that focused on AI workloads.
He told Fortune he was inspired by DeepMind's AlphaGo, an AI program that plays an ancient Chinese strategy game.
Earlier this month, another alumnus from the DeepMind team, Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft as the head of its consumer artificial intelligence business.
