United States: Foundry Technologies launches AI cloud platform

Foundry Technologies, a new cloud platform, launched this week with $80 million of funding gottenfrom a round led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partner. 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.

The company noted in a LinkedIn post that it had received seed and series A funding to launch its public cloud platform capable of running AI models. 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.”

Lightspeed said: “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.”