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The crush of dealings going into training and escape AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations . Today , Cast AI , a startup construction tool to ease and optimise workloads for AI and other tasks with automation , is raise a major turn of funding on the back of strong growth and partnership with major players in the space .
The company has raised a $ 108 million Series C that it will be using for more R&D and to expand its business enterprise in core markets like the U.S. and elsewhere . Sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the round has the company at “ near unicorn ” valuation , post - money — tight to $ 900 million from what I sympathize .
“ It ’s all about GPU , compute , and electricity , ” pronounce Yuri Frayman , Cast ’s CEO and Centennial State - founder . “ Our gaming is to ensure that we create efficiency , to be able to promote more workloads across GPUs . That is what we are about . ”
For context , when Cast last bring up Das Kapital , $ 35 million inNovember 2023 , it was valued at $ 300 million station - money , per PitchBook . Prior to this later round , the startup had raised just over $ 86 million .
Cast AI is found out of Miami , Florida , but “ is heavily placed in Europe , ” and Frayman describes it as “ a European company , ” with most of its development done in Lithuania , Poland , Romania , and Bulgaria .
It has hoard 2,100 client in the last three years of business . Companies like Akamai , BMW , FICO , Hugging Face , NielsenIQ , and Swisscom are among those using its engineering to canvas swarm and on - premise capacity and receive the optimal cost - performance ratio for distribute compute workload across them . Frayman say it integrates with all major cloud supplier and anything else that a client may be using .
At a time when companies are facing a famine of processors to train and run AI exemplar , there ’s a inviolable demand for best resourcefulness allocation . Cast AI , cite itsown research , claims that on average only 10 % of mainframe and 23 % of memory are utilized , and the same extend to GPU usage .
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This Series C — both in sizing and participant — underscores what else the startup is work on , and who else it is working with .
G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 are co - lead the round . Aglaé Ventures ( LVMH chairwoman and CEO Bernard Arnault ’s investiture firm ) and former backers Hedosophia , Cota Capital , Vintage Investment Partners , Creandum , and Uncorrelated Ventures are also participate .
Frayman said his company counts a number of these companionship as partners and customers already . “ We are partnering with Crusoe , where we ’re inside their stack , and we are partner with SoftBank to be capable to facilitate the efficiency in their AI data centers , ” he suppose , supply that the startup is also part of the large project between OpenAI and SoftBank tobuild service in Japan . “ We are partnering with the entire ecosystem , ” he added .
Cast AI is talking and doing a lot with AI these days , but that was not where the company acquire its start . Ukraine - born Frayman , who founded the companionship with Leon Kuperman and Laurent Gil in 2019 , started his life history in finance before swivel to software system development .
Back in 2006 , he and Gil build Viewdle , what Frayman described as one of the “ earliest machine learning startups . ” There , they built some of the earliest applications that used Nvidia GPUs to discipline classifier for figure searches . “ That ’s how far back we go in term of understanding the ability of political machine learning , ” he said .
That company would finally get assume by Google .
The three founders subsequently worked on swarm - base cybersecurity startupZenedge , which was the inspiration for Cast — they were struggling to keep cloud costs under control as they scaled up . ( Zenedge was eventually acquired by Oracle . )
The first habit case for Cast AI was born from their experience with that resource battle . While Cast has always had “ AI ” in its name and ethos , it was about its covering , specifically create cloud habit and allocation more effective for Kubernetes workload .
Kubernetes applications are still at the substance of the inauguration , Frayman said , both in terms of revenue and ethos ( if you visit its site , you ’ll see large electronic messaging there , too ) . But it is the rush of activity around AI where all the buzz and growth are flowing from — both customersandinvestors .
“ Cast AI is setting a Modern criterion for cloud efficiency at a time when infrastructure demands are surging , ” said Tim Yap , investiture managing director at SoftBank Investment Advisers , in a assertion .
“ Right now in the world , everyone is talking about AI agents , ” said Carl Fritjofsson , cosmopolitan partner at Creandum . “ Cast was an AI agent before we started talking about that engineering science , you know . They ’ve just been build this type of automation for a long fourth dimension . ”
