Lightning AI Secures $50M to Streamline AI Development with PyTorch Lightning

Lightning AI raises $50M to eliminate AI development headaches - SiliconANGLE

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 including 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 over 2,000 enterprises, with more than 160 million downloads in total. One unnamed Fortune 100 company was reportedly able to reduce its AI infrastructure platform setup time from 30 days to just two, thanks to Lightning AI, while a research team at Columbia University was able to finish hundreds of experiments in 12 hours, compared to 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.

Lightning AI Raises $50 Million for PyTorch Artificial Intelligence Framework | PYMNTS.com

The company, maker of the PyTorch Lightning open AI framework, announced the investment -- from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global and Nvidia -- in a news release Thursday (Nov. 21), saying it brings its total funding to $103 million. "Historically, enterprises have struggled with fragmented, in-house ML [machine learning] infrastructure requiring teams of engineers to maintain, which quickly becomes outdated," the release said. "Lightning AI eliminates this complexity by unifying dozens of separate tools into one, multi-cloud platform, offering full, low-, and no-code solutions to train and deploy models, build intelligent agents, code together on cloud GPUs, host AI apps and more -- all securely on enterprises' preferred cloud infrastructure." Launched 12 months ago, Lightning AI has gained 240,000 users across 2,000 organizations, with PyTorch Lightning being downloaded more than 160 million times, the release said. "Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack -- it's complex, costly and not core to your business," said William Falcon, Founder and CEO of Lightning AI. "The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge and unique models -- not in maintaining AI infrastructure." The funding comes during the closing weeks of 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. "2024 marks the year that generative AI became a mission-critical imperative for enterprise," Joff Redfern, partner at Menlo, said in a news release. "The numbers tell a dramatic story of organizations moving beyond pilots to embedding AI at the core of their business strategies." The VC outfit said that 72% of enterprise IT decision-makers from companies with at least 50 employees expect to see wider adoption of generative AI "in the near term," the release said. At the same time, these officials said the transformation is not yet large in scale, as companies are seeking high-value use cases for the technology. Menlo's findings are in line with research by PYMNTS Intelligence, which shows that 78% of chief financial officers say that their companies plan to increase spending on generative AI.

Lightning looks to make managing AI a piece of cake | TechCrunch

AI may be the hottest thing since sliced bread. But that doesn't mean it's getting easier to develop and run. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group poll, 74% of organizations are struggling to derive value from their AI investments. William Falcon, the creator of PyTorch Lightning, a popular open source AI framework, says that one of the biggest mistakes businesses make is underestimating the amount of legwork involved in AI orchestration. "Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack -- it's complex, costly, and not core to your business," he told TechCrunch. "The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge, and unique models -- not in maintaining AI infrastructure." Falcon, a former Navy Seal and Facebook AI Research intern, started developing PyTorch Lightning while an undergraduate at Columbia. The framework provides a high-level interface for the AI library PyTorch, abstracting away the code to set up and maintain AI systems. After dropping out his NYU Ph.D. program, Falcon decided to team up with Luis Capelo, Forbes' former data products lead, to commercialize PyTorch Lighting. Their venture, Lightning AI, takes the open source framework and layers enterprise-focused services and tools on top. "We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models [with Lightning AI] at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning," said Falcon. Lightning AI handles normally cumbersome tasks like distributing AI workloads across servers and provisioning the infrastructure needed to evaluate and train AI. The company's flagship product, AI Studios, allows customers to fine-tune and run AI models in the cloud environments that they prefer. Companies can even use Lightning AI to host AI-powered apps that run on private cloud infrastructure or their on-premises data centers. Pricing is pay-as-you-go, with a free tier that includes 22 "GPU hours" per month. Falcon says that the goal of Lightning AI is to make AI dev "as intuitive as using the iPhone." The platform has helped Cisco cut infrastructure setup time to two days, he claims, and enabled researchers at his alma mater, Columbia, finish hundreds of experiments in 12 hours. "Most people don't know this, but many of the world's leading AI products have been trained or built on Lightning," Falcon said. "For example, Nvidia's suite of models, NeMo, was built using Lightning tools -- Stable Diffusion by Stability AI is another." Certainly, Lightning AI has momentum. More than 230,000 AI developers and 3,200 organizations use the platform today, and the company recently raised $50 million in a funding round. There's competition, though. Comet, Galileo, FedML, Arize, Deepset, Diveplane, Weights & Biases, and InfuseAI offer comparable mixes of paid and free AI orchestration services. Falcon, for his part, believes the market for managed AI solutions is big enough to support many players. And he's likely not wrong. Per Fortune Business Insights, the machine learning operations industry vertical -- Lightning AI's vertical -- could be worth roughly $13 billion by 2030. With the recent $50 million investment, which was led by Cisco with participation from J.P. Morgan and Nvidia, Lightning AI's total war chest stands at $103 million. The New York-based, 50-person company plans to spend the proceeds on recruiting new customers, including government customers, and expanding the Lightning platform to new markets. "With a lean, high-performance team and a 90%+ gross margin product," Falcon said, "we are on track to reach $10 million to $20 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of next year and achieve profitability shortly after."