Lambda Secures $480 Million in Series D Funding to Expand AI Infrastructure and Cloud Services

Lambda CEO on Growing AI Infrastructure Demand

An embrace of open-source AI models is helping to fuel interest in Al cloud platforms like startup Lambda, a startup which raised $480 million in its Series D funding round from the likes of Nvidia and ARK Invest. Lambda CEO Stephen Balaban joins Caroline Hyde and Jackie Davalos on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg)

AI infrastructure startup Lambda closes $480M investment - SiliconANGLE

Lambda Labs Inc., a startup with a cloud platform optimized to run artificial intelligence models, today announced that it has raised $480 million from investors. The Series D round reportedly values the company at $2.5 billion. It was led by Andra Capital and SGW with participation from more than a dozen other investors. The group included Nvidia Corp., Super Micro Computer Inc. and prominent computer scientist Andrej Karpathy. "Lambda is investing billions of dollars to build the software platform and infrastructure powering AI," said Lambda co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Balaban. Developers use Lambda's namesake cloud platform to train AI models, fine-tune them for specific tasks and run inference workloads. The company disclosed today that its data centers host more than 25,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units. Lambda is currently in the process of adding the chipmaker's newest and fastest GPU, the Blackwell B200, to its cloud. One of the platform's main selling points is an offering called 1-Click Clusters. It allows developers to quickly provision AI clusters with up to 512 of Nvidia's H100 chips. Introduced in 2022, the H100 is two generations behind the Blackwell B200 but remains popular among data center operators. The GPU servers in a 1-Click Cluster each include a 24-terabyte flash storage pool for storing AI applications' data. Additionally, the cluster features three standard servers powered by central processing units. The latter machines process inbound network traffic from applications and run the management software that coordinates the GPUs. Lambda's cloud servers run an internally-developed software bundle called the Lambda Stack. It's based on Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, and includes preconfigured versions of several AI development tools. The software automates much of the manual work usually involved in updating those AI tools. Lambda offers its flagship cloud platform along several AI-optimized hardware products. The company is preparing to launch an AI appliance called Scalar Server that enterprises can deploy in their on-premises data centers. According to Lambda, the system is equipped with eight H100 graphics cards. The company also offers AI appliances based on Nvidia's DGX appliance architecture that likewise offer eight GPUs. In addition to its server lineup, Lambda sells a collection of AI-optimized desktop computers known as the Vector series. Developers can use the machines for tasks such as testing newly trained AI models. The most capable desktop in the series, the Vector Pro, ships with four Nvidia chips and a collection of preinstalled AI development tools. Lambda will use the proceeds from its funding round to enhance its cloud infrastructure and software. One focus of the engineering effort will be Lambda Chat, a service through which the company provides free access to open-source large language models.

Lambda Secures USD 480 Million to Expand AI Cloud Platform

Lambda, the AI Developer Cloud company, has raised USD 480 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total equity capital to USD 863 million. The round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, with participation from new investors, including Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK and Partners, and Nvidia. Strategic investments came from Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, and Wiwynn, alongside existing investors such as 1517, Crescent Cove, and USIT. Also Read: Lambda Partners with SK Telecom to Launch AI Cloud Services in South Korea Lambda provides infrastructure, cloud services and software for the fine-tuning, training, and inferencing of AI models. Following the company's last funding announcement in April, Lambda said it has grown rapidly. "AI is fundamentally restructuring our economy. Lambda is investing billions of dollars to build the software platform and infrastructure powering AI," said Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban. "We build software tools that delight the AI Developer, and a platform that truly puts AI into the hands of the many. This investment will accelerate the expansion of the Lambda Cloud platform, Lambda Model Inference API, and Lambda Chat AI Assistant." Also Read: Glassbox Raises USD 1.2 Million to Transform Spreadsheet for AI-Enabled Corporate Transactions Since its last funding round in April, the company has expanded its SOC 2 compliance to Type 2, enhancing security for its public cloud platform. Lambda also introduced 1-Click Clusters, the first self-serve, on-demand GPU clusters for AI training. Additionally, it launched the Lambda Inference API and Lambda Chat AI Assistant, enabling hosted access to open-source AI models like DeepSeek R1. Also Read: Jump Secures USD 20 Million Funding to Expand AI Solutions for Financial Advisors "In a landscape where speed and scalability are paramount, Lambda's deep understanding of AI hardware and software provides developers with critical infrastructure to stay ahead of the curve," said Paul Tuan, Managing Partner of Andra Capital. "We're confident that Lambda's solutions will be central to powering the next wave of AI-driven innovation and delivering tangible value across industries." JPMorgan served as the private placement agent for the financing.

AI And Nvidia GPU Provider Lambda Raises $480M To Boost LLM Innovation, Cloud Platform Development

"We'll build more software tools that delight AI developers and deploy more GPUs to meet the massive customer demand," said Lambda CEO Stephen Balaban regarding his company's new $480 million investment from Nvidia and others. AI GPU and cloud standout Lambda has raised $480 million in a Series D funding round, with investment from Nvidia and private equity firms, with the goal of fueling innovation around Lambda's Cloud Platform and Lambda Chat, which hosts DeepSeek's R-1 AI model. "We'll build more software tools that delight AI developers and deploy more GPUs to meet the massive customer demand," said Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban (pictured) in a blog post regarding his new $480 million investment plans. "The AI revolution is in full swing, and Lambda is here to power it." In February 2024, the company raised $320 million during its Series C funding round. Balaban said the new $480 million investment will help Lambda scale both infrastructure and software -- including Lambda's Cloud Platform -- as well as enable AI developers to train, fine-tune, and deploy models faster and easier than ever before. "We'll also continue to develop Lambda Chat, which hosts DeepSeek-R1 and many other open-source models," the Lambda CEO said. Lambda says it offers the world's least expensive GPU cloud for AI training and inference. For example, Lambda offers Nvidia H100s and 3,200 Gbps of InfiniBand for $1.89 per hour. Lambda's $480 Million Investment The Series D investment round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW with participation from new investors Nvidia, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners and others. Lambda's portfolio spans on-premises GPU hardware to hosted GPUs in the cloud. Lambda's hardware and private cloud business serves over 5,000 customers in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and the U.S. government. As a top Nvidia processor provider, Lambda offers fast access to the latest GPUs and architectures for training, fine-tuning and inferencing of generative AI and large language models (LLMs). "Over the last twelve months, AI has become more democratized because of two forces: open source and LLM reasoning. We saw dozens of high-quality open models, including Llama, DeepSeek-R1, and Mochi 1," said Balaban. "These models put state-of-the-art AI in the hands of every person, company, and research institution. Open source accelerates progress across the field." Balaban said open-source reasoning models allow anybody to contribute to the progress of AI and no company is better positioned than Lambda to provide compute capabilities. Lambda Innovation History Founded in 2012, Lambda quickly launched an internal GPU cloud to support AI image editing products. By 2017, the company introduced Lambda Quad Deep Leaning GPU workstation and the Lambda Blade GPU server, dubbing it the world's first plug-and-play deep learning supercomputer under $20,000. In 2018, Lambda launched the Lambda GPU Cloud and Stack, an AI software repository. By 2024, the company unveiled its 1-Click Clusters that provides AI developers instant access to Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU clusters with Nvidia InfiniBand networking. "We envision a future where the impact of AI is so substantial that it's used daily by every man, woman, and child on the planet," Lambda CEO said. "A world of one person, one GPU."

AI Cloud Startup Lambda Raises $480 Million in New Round; Nvidia Among Investors

(Reuters) - Lambda, a cloud computing firm specializing in providing hardware and services to power artificial intelligence development, has raised $480 million in a Series D equity round from investors including Nvidia, the company told Reuters. The round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, the family office of early Google investor Scott Hassan, bringing its total equity raised to $863 million. The company did not disclose its valuation, but sources said this round gave the firm a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion. ARK Invest, G Squared, and servers provider Super Micro also participated in the round. Lambda offers cloud services and software designed for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models. A major part of the business is renting out servers powered by Nvidia's artificial intelligence GPUs, which has benefited from the spiking demand for such hardware in the AI boom. It also offers software and hosted access to enterprises to run and deploy different AI models, including open source ones. Lambda CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban said the company has seen much growth in the deployment of open source models, including China's DeepSeek. "Lambda is really well positioned as a company to take advantage of open source AI models like DeepSeek-R1 because we have well over 25,000 GPUs on our cloud platform that can be readily repurposed to host these open source models," he said in an interview. The launch of DeepSeek-R1 last month significantly accelerated demand for Nvidia H200 chips from its clients, according to Balaban. Enterprises are pre-purchasing large blocks of Lambda's H200 capacity even before public availability. He added the new investment would be used to purchase more Nvidia chips for its cloud platform, as well as expansion of its software products including Model Inference API, and its Chat AI Assistant. Founded in 2012 by a group of AI engineers, Lambda's hardware and cloud business serves over 5,000 customers across industries including manufacturing and financial services, as well as the U.S. government. (Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Jan Harvey)