The company will use the capital to expand its cloud and software engineering teams, pay for fixed assets related to its cloud business, and as working capital for its deep learning hardware business.
"Fortune 500 companies, startups, and universities are forced to build huge teams to administer the compute resources required to train deep learning models," said Stephen Balaban, co-founder, and CEO of Lambda. "We want to build a world where a single researcher can manage petaflops of GPU compute. A world where training a model on a datacenter scale computer is as easy as training a model on your laptop."
"We’re building the easiest-to-use and most cost-effective GPU cloud for deep learning," said Remy Guercio, Head of Cloud at Lambda. "It's not a coincidence that Lambda GPU Cloud already ranks number three on a Google search for ‘GPU cloud’, behind only NVIDIA and Google itself."
The Series A round saw participation from 1517, Gradient Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Razer, and Georges Harik. The debt facility is provided by Silicon Valley Bank. With the exception of Razer, all major funding parties were existing Lambda investors. Lambda’s Board of Directors includes Robert Youngjohns and Zach Bratun-Glennon, Partner at Gradient Ventures. Robert was previously the EVP and GM of HP Software at HPE and, before that, President of Microsoft North America. He has also held senior leadership roles at Callidus Cloud, Sun Microsystems, and IBM.
Razer, the multinational designer of gaming hardware, participated in the round as a strategic investor. "At first glance, it seems like an odd pairing. What does the world-famous gaming hardware company have to do with deep learning infrastructure? It comes down to a shared strategic vision," said Balaban. "Razer's motto, ‘For Gamers. By Gamers’, perfectly aligns with Lambda’s hyperfocus on building deep learning systems for ML engineers, by ML engineers."
Current investors and advisors to Lambda include 1517 Fund, Gradient Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Razer, Scott McNealy, Austin Russell, Georges Harik, James Hong, James Cham, Jun Hong Heng, Nicolas Pinto, Gary Bradski, Ken Patchett, Randy Ching, Keller Rinaudo, and others.
About Lambda
Founded and led by AI and ML engineers, Lambda provides deep learning computing infrastructure including GPU cloud services, servers, GPU clusters, GPU workstations, and GPU laptops to customers such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon Research, Tencent, Kaiser Permanente, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and the Department of Defense. Find out more at www.lambdalabs.com.