Synthetic intelligence (AI) growth platform Lightning AI has obtained a $50 million fairness funding.
The corporate, maker of the PyTorch Lightning open AI framework, introduced the funding — from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global and Nvidia — in a news release Thursday (Nov. 21), saying it brings its complete funding to $103 million.
“Traditionally, enterprises have struggled with fragmented, in-house ML [machine learning] infrastructure requiring groups of engineers to keep up, which shortly turns into outdated,” the discharge mentioned. “Lightning AI eliminates this complexity by unifying dozens of separate instruments into one, multi-cloud platform, providing full, low-, and no-code options to coach and deploy fashions, construct clever brokers, code collectively on cloud GPUs, host AI apps and extra — all securely on enterprises’ most popular cloud infrastructure.”
Launched 12 months in the past, Lightning AI has gained 240,000 customers throughout 2,000 organizations, with PyTorch Lightning being downloaded greater than 160 million instances, the discharge mentioned.
“Constructing your personal AI platform at present is like constructing your personal Slack — it’s complicated, expensive and never core to your enterprise,” mentioned William Falcon, Founder and CEO of Lightning AI. “The worth for enterprises lies of their knowledge, area information and distinctive fashions —not in sustaining AI infrastructure.”
The funding comes in the course of the closing weeks of a yr that has seen enterprise spending on generative AI enhance sixfold, as companies started incorporating the know-how after first experimenting with it.
This spending reached $13.8 billion, in comparison with $2.3 billion final yr, enterprise capital agency Menlo Ventures introduced earlier this week.
“2024 marks the yr that generative AI turned a mission-critical crucial for enterprise,” Joff Redfern, associate at Menlo, mentioned in a information launch. “The numbers inform a dramatic story of organizations shifting past pilots to embedding AI on the core of their enterprise methods.”
The VC outfit mentioned that 72% of enterprise IT decision-makers from corporations with at the very least 50 workers count on to see wider adoption of generative AI “within the close to time period,” the discharge mentioned.
On the identical time, these officers mentioned the transformation isn’t but massive in scale, as corporations are searching for high-value use circumstances for the know-how.
Menlo’s findings are consistent with analysis by PYMNTS Intelligence, which exhibits that 78% of chief monetary officers say that their corporations plan to increase spending on generative AI.
