Lightning AI raises $50M to eliminate AI development headaches – News

Artificial intelligence development platform provider Lightning AI said today it has closed on $50 million in an equity funding round that brings its total amount raised to $103 million.

Today’s round was led by Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global and Nvidia Corp.’s investment arm. The New York-based company said the funds will help it to recruit more customers and expand its platform, which is centered on the PyTorch Lightning framework.

Lightning AI, officially known as Grid.ai Inc., is led by its founder and Chief Executive Officer William Falcon, the creator of the open-source PyTorch Lightning project that’s designed to ease the burden and expense of building complex platforms for orchestrating AI workloads.

PyTorch Lightning provides companies with collaborative, cloud-based and persistent development environments for building AI applications and systems, catering to everything from model development, fine-tuning and deployment, as well as more specific tasks like designing AI agents that can perform work on their user’s behalf.

The platform, which integrates with popular machine learning tools like OpenAI, VSCode and others, is designed to simplify the fragmented infrastructure that supports traditional AI projects and requires teams of engineers to maintain.

By unifying dozens of separate tools for AI development into a single, multicloud platform, Pytorch Lightning provides companies with full-, low- and no-code environments for training and deploying AI models and creating intelligent agents. Developers can collaborate and code together, use the platform to host AI applications, access cloud-based graphics processing units and more, directly from Lightning AI’s platform, with everything hosted on their chosen cloud infrastructure.

The startup reckons that its ability to keep a lid on AI infrastructure can help organizations reduce the time it takes to get new AI applications built and deployed from months to just weeks. It enables them to iterate much more rapidly than before, in other words.

Lightning AI operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and to help entice developers it includes a free tier that provides access to 22 GPU hours per month, plus private cloud deployment options.

Falcon refers to the era of AI computing as “software 2.0” and says it will require a paradigm shift away from traditional software development, with companies forced to adapt to using GPUs, massive datasets and collaborative workflows. And just as Amazon Web Services Inc. emerged as a hub of traditional software development, Falcon wants Lightning AI to become the foundation for the Software 2.0 era.

Whether or not it can achieve that goal remains to be seen, but it won’t be easy for Lightning AI faces a lot of competition, with rivals that include Weights & Biases Co., Comet ML Inc., Galileo Technologies Inc., Arize AI Inc., Deepset GmbH and Diveplane all offering competing AI orchestration platforms.

Still, Lightning AI seems to be making good progress. The startup only launched its platform 12 months ago, and in that time it has already gained more than 240,000 users across more than 2,000 enterprises, with more than 160 million downloads in total.

One unnamed Fortune 100 company reportedly reduced its AI infrastructure platform setup time from 30 days to just two, thanks to Lightning AI, while a research team at Columbia University finished hundreds of experiments in 12 hours, compared with the usual 60 days.

“We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning,” Falcon said. “The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge and unique models — not in maintaining AI infrastructure.”

Lightning AI’s funding round is likely to be one of the last in a year that has seen enterprise spending on generative AI increase sixfold, as businesses began incorporating the technology after first experimenting with it.

This spending reached $13.8 billion, compared to $2.3 billion last year, venture capital firm Menlo Ventures announced earlier this week.

Image: Lightning AI