Cast AI Raises $108M to Optimize Cloud Resources for AI and Kubernetes Workloads

Cast AI raises $108M to get the max out of AI, Kubernetes and other workloads | TechCrunch

The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organisations. Today, Cast AI -- a startup building tools to ease and optimise AI and other workloads with automation -- is raising a major round of funding on the back of its strong growth and partnerships with major players in the space. The company has raised $108 million -- a Series C that it will be using both for more R&D as well as to expand its business both in core markets like the U.S., as well as elsewhere. We understand from sources that the round puts the company's post-money valuation at "near unicorn" valuation -- close to $900 million from what I understand. "It's all about GPU, compute and electricity," said Yuri Frayman, Cast's CEO and co-founder. "Our play is to ensure that we create efficiency, to be able to promote more workloads across GPUs. That is what we are about." (To put that valuation into some context, when Cast raised its last funding, $35 million, in November 2023, it was valued at $300 million post-money, per PitchBook data. The startup prior to this latest round raised just over $86 million.) Cast AI is officially based out of Miami, Florida but "is heavily situated in Europe" and is described as "a European company" by Frayman, with most of its development out of Lithuania, as well as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. It has amassed 2,100 customers in the last three years of business. Companies like Akamai, BMW, FICO, HuggingFace, NielsenIQ, and Swisscom are among those using its technology to analyse an organization's cloud and on-premise capacity, to find the optimal cost-performance ratio around how to distribute compute workloads across them. Frayman says that it integrates with all major cloud providers and anything else that a customer may be using. At a time where companies are facing a shortage of processors to train and run AI models, the need for better resource allocation is a strong one. Cast, citing its own research, claims that on average only 10% of CPUs and 23% of memory are utilized, and the same extends out to GPU usage. This Series C -- both in size and participants -- underscores what else it is working on, and whom else it is working with. G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 are co-leading the round, with Aglaé Ventures (LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault's investment firm), and previous backers Hedosophia, Cota Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Creandum, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participating. Notably, Frayman pointed out that the oversubscribed round puts the company into the same portfolio stable as OpenAI and the AI infrastructure provider Crusoe Energy -- two companies that are, with SoftBank, Oracle and others, working on the massive Stargate AI infrastructure project out of the U.S. Frayman said that his company counts a number of these companies as partners and customers already. "We are partnering with Crusoe, where we're inside their stack, and we are partnering with SoftBank to be able to facilitate the efficiency in their AI datacenters," he said, adding that it is also part of the large project between OpenAI and SoftBank to build services 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 exactly where the company got its start. Ukraine-born Frayman, who founded the company with Leon Kuperman and Laurent Gil in 2019, started his career in finance before pivoting to software development. Back in 2006, he and Gil built what Frayman described to me as one of the "earliest machine learning startups" -- Viewdle. There they build some of the earliest applications of using Nvidia's GPUs to train its classifiers for image searches. "That's how far back we go in terms of understanding the power of machine learning," he said. That company would eventually get acquired by Google. Along with Kuperman the three founders later worked on a cloud-based cybersecurity startup, Zenedge, which was the inspiration for Cast: there, they struggled to keep cloud costs under control as they scaled up. (Zenedge was eventually acquired by none other than Oracle.) The first use case for Cast came out of their experience with that resource struggle, and while it has always had "AI" in its name and ethos, it was about the application of it, specifically make cloud use and allocation more efficient for Kubernetes workloads. Kubernetes applications are still at the heart of Cast, Frayman said, both in terms of revenues and ethos. (And if you go to its site, that is the prominent messaging there, too.) But it is the surge of activity around AI where all the buzz and growth are coming from at the moment, from customers and investors. "Cast AI is setting a new standard for cloud efficiency at a time when infrastructure demands are surging," said Tim Yap, Investment Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. "Right now in the world, everyone is talking about AI agents," said Carl Fritjofsson, general partner at Creandum. "Cast was was an AI agent before we started talking about that technology, you know. They've just been building these type of automation for a long time."

Cast AI secures $108 million funding to expand cloud automation

April 30 (Reuters) - Cast AI, a Miami-based startup that helps businesses automate cloud infrastructure management, said on Wednesday it has raised $108 million in a late-stage funding round led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The oversubscribed round, which also saw participation from existing investors such as Aglaé Ventures, valued the company at $850 million, a person familiar with the matter said. This brings Cast AI's total funding to over $180 million, as it looks to expand to more markets and cater to growing demand. The company helps businesses reduce cloud costs and improve performance by automating how applications use cloud resources like CPUs and GPUs. Cast AI said demand is rising quickly as more organizations adopt AI tools and struggle with the high cost of cloud computing. "Reducing costs is key. But it's not just about costs -- it's about automatically finding the right models and availability of GPUs and CPUs, maintaining performance and cutting costs," Cast AI founder Laurent Gil told Reuters. "Over the past six months, we have seen a major acceleration in demand for Kubernetes automation as AI adoption surged." Kubernetes is an open-source tool that helps manage apps on the cloud. Cast AI counts 2,100 companies around the world as customers and some large clients include Akamai (AKAM.O), opens new tab, German automaker BMW (BMWG.DE), opens new tab, FICO (FICO.N), opens new tab and HuggingFace. The company said the new funding will be used to expand its automation platform, hire more talent and reach more global customers. Its new backers, including SoftBank and G2, also invest in AI companies such as OpenAI and Crusoe Energy Systems. The ChatGPT creator, SoftBank (9984.T), opens new tab and cloud firm Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab are key partners behind the $500 billion Stargate project to build several data centers in the United States. Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Media & TelecomADAS, AV & SafetySoftware-Defined Vehicle Akash Sriram Thomson Reuters Akash reports on technology companies in the United States, electric vehicle companies, and the space industry. His reporting usually appears in the Autos & Transportation and Technology sections. He has a postgraduate degree in Conflict, Development, and Security from the University of Leeds. Akash's interests include music, football (soccer), and Formula 1.

Cloud optimization startup Cast AI raises $108 million to achieve 'almost unicorn' valuation - SiliconANGLE

Cloud optimization startup Cast AI raises $108 million to achieve 'almost unicorn' valuation Cast AI Group Inc., a six-year-old startup that specializes in optimizing the efficiency of cloud-native environments, today said it raised $108 million in a Series C round that brings its total funding to $181 million. Two blue-chip investors led the funding: G2 Venture Partners LLC and SB Global Advisers Limited's SoftBank Vision Fund 2. SoftBank is one of the world's largest venture investors, and G2 was founded by four former Kleiner Perkins LLC senior partners. It specializes in sustainable technology. Cast AI said the funding provides a "substantial valuation step-up," without specifics. In an interview, Chief Executive Laurent Gill said the investment puts his company at "almost unicorn valuation," referring to the term used for companies that achieve a value of $1 billion. Cast AI said the funding comes as the company has reached hypergrowth, doubling its customer base between 2023 and 2024 and totaling 2,100 organizations today. Equally important is that the newest customers are some of the world's largest companies. "It's not just that we doubled the customer base, but our customers became much bigger," Gill said. "This took us by storm." Cast AI specializes in automating deployments of the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers. Its technology optimizes the use of cloud infrastructure to drive up utilization rates. Humans can't keep up with constantly changing prices and configurations, so they tend to over-provision out of caution. The results is wasted money. Cast AI's published benchmarks estimate that average cloud CPU and memory utilization are just 10% and 23%, respectively, and that about 60% of cloud instances overprovision memory. Cast AI says its automation can usually cut cloud bills in half. Its technology takes automated actions to optimize cost, security and speed on any cloud platform. "Our goal in life is not to show you where you spend money; it is to fully automate the management of applications to make them more efficient," Gill said. In November, the company introduced AI Enabler, a tool that leverages Kubernetes to intelligently route queries to the most efficient large language models. Gill said the feature is aimed at AI inferencing, or the the deployment of trained AI models, which require access to amounts of graphics processing unit power. Despite their high cost, GPUs are typically used at only about 30% of their full capacity. "We optimize use because we know where and when GPUs are available," Gill said. "We know where they are available as spot Instances and can move to those places almost in real time." CastAI claims it can reduce the cost of GPU-intensive workloads between three- and 10-fold by using an artificial intelligence agent that is "obsessed with GPUs." Gill said the recently released feature has been a hit with large companies. "We don't have a Fortune 500 customer company that isn't using our product for managing GPUs," he said. This will probably be Cast AI's last funding round, the CEO said. "We could be profitable today if we wanted," he said. "We have healthy margins and numbers." Other funding participants include Aglaé Management SAS, Cota Capital Management LLC, Hedosophia Services Ltd., Creandum AB and Vintage Ventures Management Ltd.

Cast AI secures $108 million funding to expand cloud automation

The oversubscribed round, which also saw participation from existing investors such as Aglae Ventures, valued the company at $850 million, a person familiar with the matter said.Cast AI, a Miami-based startup that helps businesses automate cloud infrastructure management, said on Wednesday it has raised $108 million in a late-stage funding round led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The oversubscribed round, which also saw participation from existing investors such as Aglae Ventures, valued the company at $850 million, a person familiar with the matter said. This brings Cast AI's total funding to over $180 million, as it looks to expand to more markets and cater to growing demand. The company helps businesses reduce cloud costs and improve performance by automating how applications use cloud resources like CPUs and GPUs. Cast AI said demand is rising quickly as more organizations adopt AI tools and struggle with the high cost of cloud computing. "Reducing costs is key. But it's not just about costs-it's about automatically finding the right models and availability of GPUs and CPUs, maintaining performance and cutting costs," Cast AI founder Laurent Gil told Reuters. "Over the past six months, we have seen a major acceleration in demand for Kubernetes automation as AI adoption surged." Kubernetes is an open-source tool that helps manage apps on the cloud. Cast AI counts 2,100 companies around the world as customers and some large clients include Akamai, German automaker BMW, FICO and HuggingFace. The company said the new funding will be used to expand its automation platform, hire more talent and reach more global customers. Its new backers, including SoftBank and G2, also invest in AI companies such as OpenAI and Crusoe Energy Systems. The ChatGPT creator, SoftBank and cloud firm Oracle are key partners behind the $500 billion Stargate project to build several data centers in the United States.

Cast AI secures $108 million funding to expand cloud automation

(Reuters) -Cast AI, a Miami-based startup that helps businesses automate cloud infrastructure management, said on Wednesday it has raised $108 million in a late-stage funding round led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The oversubscribed round, which also saw participation from existing investors such as Aglaé Ventures, valued the company at $850 million, a person familiar with the matter said. This brings Cast AI's total funding to over $180 million, as it looks to expand to more markets and cater to growing demand. The company helps businesses reduce cloud costs and improve performance by automating how applications use cloud resources like CPUs and GPUs. Cast AI said demand is rising quickly as more organizations adopt AI tools and struggle with the high cost of cloud computing. "Reducing costs is key. But it's not just about costs--it's about automatically finding the right models and availability of GPUs and CPUs, maintaining performance and cutting costs," Cast AI founder Laurent Gil told Reuters. "Over the past six months, we have seen a major acceleration in demand for Kubernetes automation as AI adoption surged." Kubernetes is an open-source tool that helps manage apps on the cloud. Cast AI counts 2,100 companies around the world as customers and some large clients include Akamai, German automaker BMW, FICO and HuggingFace. The company said the new funding will be used to expand its automation platform, hire more talent and reach more global customers. Its new backers, including SoftBank and G2, also invest in AI companies such as OpenAI and Crusoe Energy Systems. The ChatGPT creator, SoftBank and cloud firm Oracle are key partners behind the $500 billion Stargate project to build several data centers in the United States. (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)