Lambda Raises $320M to Build a GPU Cloud for AI

Lambda’s mission is to build the #1 AI compute platform in the world. To accomplish this, we’ll need lots of NVIDIA GPUs, ultra-fast networking, lots of data center space, and lots of great new software to delight you and your AI engineering team.

Today, we are proud to announce that Lambda has raised a $320 million Series C led by US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT) with participation from new investors B Capital, SK Telecom, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and existing investors Crescent Cove, Mercato Partners, 1517 Fund, Bloomberg Beta, and Gradient Ventures, among others. 

With this new financing, Lambda will accelerate the growth of our GPU cloud, ensuring AI engineering teams have access to thousands of NVIDIA GPUs with high-speed NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.

When we started selling AI infrastructure in 2017, the transformer architecture had just been published in the seminal paper “Attention is All You Need.” (The authors of that paper have gone on to found notable AI startups including Adept, Character.ai, and Co:here.) The architecture outlined in that paper became the building block for large language models like GPT-4. Back then, Lambda’s customers were primarily academic researchers working on novel model architectures in the fields of image recognition, speech generation, image generation, and natural language processing. It was five years before the launch of ChatGPT.

Fast forward to 2024, large language models and image generation models enable the creation of software that was simply impossible to build just 3 years ago. Myriad AI startups are working around the clock to be first to market with a product. Fortune 500 enterprises are racing to integrate generative AI into their existing products. We’ve seen young startups grow their businesses from $0 to millions in annual revenue by building their production inference workloads on Lambda Cloud.

“As a founding team member, growing Lambda these last six years has been an honor I will always cherish,” said Mitesh Agrawal, Chief Operating Officer and Head of Cloud. “We’ve accomplished a lot, but what lies on the horizon for us and our customers is even bigger. We can’t wait to see what you and your team build with Lambda Cloud and Lambda Hardware.” 

Tony Wang, portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., invested in Lambda's Series C round, “We look forward to partnering with Lambda as an innovative accelerated computing infrastructure provider tailored for the future of AI. We appreciate the team’s vision to build out an infrastructure and software platform of choice for ML engineers.”

Building the world’s #1 AI compute platform (in the cloud and on-prem!) is challenging work and today’s announcement wouldn’t have happened without the incredible team we’ve assembled. As we grow, we’ll continue to recruit smart, hard working people excited by the opportunity to solve hard problems at the intersection of AI, cloud infrastructure, and high performance computing. If this sounds like you, see our open roles at https://lambdalabs.com/careers.