TrueFoundry Secures $19M to Revolutionize AI Model Management and Deployment

TrueFoundry nabs $19M for its AI model management platform - SiliconANGLE

TrueFoundry Inc., a startup with a platform for managing artificial intelligence workloads, today announced that it has raised $19 million in funding. Intel Capital led the Series A round. Eniac Ventures, Surge and Jump Capital chipped in as well. TrueFoundry says that its institutional backers were joined by several angel investors including former Cohesity Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mohit Aron. Developing the software scaffolding necessary to run AI models in production can take months of work. TrueFoundry's namesake platform promises to ease the task. The software includes a set of prepackaged features for deploying and maintaining large language models, which spares developers the hassle of building everything from scratch. Enterprises that build their own AI models often maintain cloud-based VS Code and Jupyter Notebook environments. The former tool is a popular code editor, while the latter eases the development of neural networks. TrueFoundry automatically shuts down VS Code and Jupyter Notebook environments after they're no longer needed to cut infrastructure expenses. The company says that its platform can also help enterprises manage their large language models. According to TrueFoundry, its software enables developers to turn a newly created LLM into an application programming interface with one click. The API makes it easier to integrate into the model with other workloads. Under the hood, TrueFoundry automatically adjusts the amount of infrastructure available to the API based on workload demand. The platform can reduce LLM costs by making use of spot instances. Those are virtual machines that run on unused hardware in cloud providers' data centers. Spot instances cost significantly less than standard virtual machines, but have technical limitations that can make using them difficult. TrueFoundry includes a library of more than 30 open-source LLMs. A fine-tuning tool allows customers to optimize those LLMs for their requirements by supplying them with custom training data. TrueFoundry uses a fine-tuning technique called QLoRA that trades off some training speed for a significant reduction in memory usage. After customers deploy an LLM, the platform can monitor it for technical issues. TrueFoundry tracks metrics such as inference cost, latency and error rates. "Enterprises using TrueFoundry have built and launched their internal AI platforms in as little as two months, achieving ROI within four months-a stark contrast to the industry average of 14 months," said TrueFoundry CEO Nikunj Bajaj (pictured, right, with co-founders Abhishek Choudhary and Anuraag Gutgutia.) On occasion of today's funding announcement, the company disclosed that its platform has been adopted by more than 30 customers. The list includes Nvidia Corp., which is using the software to optimize its LLM workloads' graphics card usage. TrueFoundry claims that customers have deployed more than 1,000 AI clusters powered by its technology over the past year.

TrueFoundry nabs $19M for its LLM management platform - SiliconANGLE

TrueFoundry Inc., a startup with a platform for managing artificial intelligence workloads, today announced that it has raised $19 million in funding. Intel Capital led the Series A round. Eniac Ventures, Surge and Jump Capital chipped in as well. TrueFoundry says that its institutional backers were joined by several angel investors including former Cohesity Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mohit Aron. Developing the software scaffolding necessary to run AI models in production can take months of work. TrueFoundry's namesake platform promises to ease the task. The software includes a set of prepackaged features for deploying and maintaining large language models, which spares developers the hassle of building everything from scratch. Enterprises that build their own AI models often maintain cloud-based VS Code and Jupyter Notebook environments. The former tool is a popular code editor, while the latter eases the development of neural networks. TrueFoundry automatically shuts down VS Code and Jupyter Notebook environments after they're no longer needed to cut infrastructure expenses. The company says that its platform can also help enterprises manage their large language models. According to TrueFoundry, its software enables developers to turn a newly created LLM into an application programming interface with one click. The API makes it easier to integrate into the model with other workloads. Under the hood, TrueFoundry automatically adjusts the amount of infrastructure available to the API based on workload demand. The platform can reduce LLM costs by making use of spot instances. Those are virtual machines that run on unused hardware in cloud providers' data centers. Spot instances cost significantly less than standard virtual machines, but have technical limitations that can make using them difficult. TrueFoundry includes a library of more than 30 open-source LLMs. A fine-tuning tool allows customers to optimize those LLMs for their requirements by supplying them with custom training data. TrueFoundry uses a fine-tuning technique called QLoRA that trades off some training speed for a significant reduction in memory usage. After customers deploy an LLM, the platform can monitor it for technical issues. TrueFoundry tracks metrics such as inference cost, latency and error rates. "Enterprises using TrueFoundry have built and launched their internal AI platforms in as little as two months, achieving ROI within four months-a stark contrast to the industry average of 14 months," said TrueFoundry CEO Nikunj Bajaj (pictured, right, with co-founders Abhishek Choudhary and Anuraag Gutgutia.) On occasion of today's funding announcement, the company disclosed that its platform has been adopted by more than 30 customers. The list includes Nvidia Corp., which is using the software to optimize its LLM workloads' graphics card usage. TrueFoundry claims that customers have deployed more than 1,000 AI clusters powered by its technology over the past year.

Intel Capital fuels TrueFoundry's $19M funding to help boost AI deployments at scale | TechCrunch

TrueFoundry, a startup run by a group of former Meta engineers to help enterprises deploy AI systems at scale, has raised $19 million in fresh investment led by Intel Capital. With GenAI's emergence following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, enterprises of all sizes have looked at ways they could embrace AI. But GenAI relies on large language models to deliver intelligence (read efficiency), demanding significant compute power. Not all enterprises have the advantage of accessing hundreds or thousands of GPUs, making GPU optimization essential. Further, enterprises need to experiment with multiple models to find the best fit for their use case and fine-tune existing models to make AI systems relevant to their operations. TrueFoundry addresses all this with its software available under a platform-as-a-service model, targeting full-stack data scientists. It provides features such as auto-scaling, proactive maintenance, centralized access controls, and real-time monitoring to simplify end-to-end AI deployments. Founded in June 2021 by former Meta engineers Nikunj Bajaj and Abhishek Choudhary along with their IIT Kharagpur batchmate Anuraag Gutgutia, TrueFoundry initially offered a cross-cloud native software to speed up machine learning deployments. However, as GenAI became mainstream in 2023, the startup modified its system to support GenAI capabilities. "Earlier, data scientists would only work with models and experiment with them, but a lot of the deployment was handed over to ML engineers. With our system, what we are enabling is that data scientists themselves can actually build this entire complex system and test it at scale before handing it over to the platform team for final deployments," Gutgutia said in an exclusive interview. The startup provides a software solution called an autopilot system, which uses AI to look at logs and metrics to help scale AI applications by adjusting GPU usage and fixing memory requirements. Using the autopilot system, Gutgutia told TechCrunch, one of TrueFoundry's customers with a small team of two people managed 10 million requests per second. TrueFoundry currently has 30 paid customers worldwide alongside "a lot of" users accessing its open-source RAG framework for experimentation. Of these customers, GPU giant NVIDIA uses the software to build and deploy agents that optimize its GPU clusters. Med-tech company Resmed also uses TrueFoundry's offering to develop an internal AI platform. Similarly, Siemens Healthineers, Automation Anywhere, Games24x7, and Whatfix are among the customers. The startup has architectured its software using Kubernetes, which makes it multi-cloud ready and compatible with all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, among others. Additionally, enterprises can deploy the platform natively on-premise. Enterprises using TrueFoundry have built and launched their internal AI platforms in two months and achieved their ROI in four months, unlike the industry average of 14 months, Bajaj stated. Gutgutia added that the startup delivered its customers with around 40-50% cost reduction on infrastructure spends, along with a 10× deployment speed improvement, no matter whether they are working on an agent, RAG, a complex deep learning model or a fine-tuned model. Cloud vendors have started offering their own software to ease the building and deployment of AI models, such as Amazon's Sagemaker and Google Cloud's Vertex. Nonetheless, Gutgutia told TechCrunch that TrueFoundry's solution is still pertinent as it helps "accelerate the usage of compute" for cloud providers, speed up the time-to-market for AI apps and reduce their overall costs. The all-equity Series A round saw participation from Eniac Ventures, Peak XV Partners, and Jump Capital, as well as angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Mohit Aron, and Cyan Bainster. The startup will utilize the funding to expand the team from 45 members based in India to go-to-market positions in the U.S., including sales, customer success, and product marketing roles. It also plans to invest in partnerships, especially with cloud vendors and is in the process of getting listed in the key cloud marketplaces, beginning with AWS Marketplace. Additionally, TrueFoundry aims to launch its AI agent that will help suggest the right resources and enable auto-scaling, as well as troubleshooting. With the fresh funding, TrueFoundry has raised over $21 million in total, including the $2.3 million in its seed round in September 2022 led by Peak XV's (then Sequoia India) Surge. The startup quadrupled its customer base last year and deployed over 1,000 clusters across clients for ML workloads. Gutgutia also told TechCrunch that it is at "north of $1.5 million ARR" and is looking to double down this year.

TrueFoundry Bags $19 Mn To Build A Universal AI Platform

Founded by Nikunj Bajaj, Abhishek Choudhary and Anuraag Gutgutia, TrueFoundry is a PaaS startup that simplifies the process of deploying and managing machine learning (ML) models in production Platform as a service (PaaS) startup TrueFoundry has announced that it has raise of $19 Mn (INR 166.50 Cr) in a Series A funding round led by Intel's investment arm, Intel Capital. The round saw its existing investors, Eniac Ventures and Peak XV's investment arm Surge, double down on the startup. New investors, including Jump Capital and angels Gokul Rajaram, Mohit Aron, and Cyan Banister, too, participated in the round. The startup plans to utilise the fresh funds to accelerate its development of a universal platform, which builds and deploys AI applications with "zero infrastructure hassles". Besides, the capital will also be utilised to expand its team and drive go-to-market efforts to drive customer acquisition and expansion. "At TrueFoundry, we're building a future where AI manages AI-removing the bottlenecks of human intervention and unlocking unparalleled speed and scale," CTO and cofounder Abhishek Choudhary said. Founded by Nikunj Bajaj, Abhishek Choudhary and Anuraag Gutgutia, TrueFoundry is a PaaS startup that simplifies the process of deploying and managing machine learning (ML) models in production.