Enterprise

Run:AI raises $30M Series B for its AI compute platform

Comment

Image Credits: Run.AI

Run:AI, a Tel Aviv-based company that helps businesses orchestrate and optimize their AI compute infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and S Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $43 million.

At the core of Run:AI’s platform is the ability to effectively virtualize and orchestrate AI workloads on top of its Kubernetes-based scheduler. Traditionally, it was always hard to virtualize GPUs, so even as demand for training AI models has increased, a lot of the physical GPUs often set idle for long periods because it was hard to dynamically allocate them between projects.

Image Credits: Run.AI

The promise behind Run:AI’s platform is that it allows its users to abstract away all of the AI infrastructure and pool all of their GPU resources — no matter whether in the cloud or on-premises. This also makes it easier for businesses to share these resources between users and teams. In the process, IT teams also get better insights into how their compute resources are being used.

“Every enterprise is either already rearchitecting themselves to be built around learning systems powered by AI, or they should be,” said Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners and now a board member at Run:AI.” Just as virtualization and then container technology transformed CPU-based workloads over the last decades, Run:AI is bringing orchestration and virtualization technology to AI chipsets such as GPUs, dramatically accelerating both AI training and inference. The system also future-proofs deep learning workloads, allowing them to inherit the power of the latest hardware with less rework. In Run:AI, we’ve found disruptive technology, an experienced team and a SaaS-based market strategy that will help enterprises deploy the AI they’ll need to stay competitive.”

Run:AI says that it is currently working with customers in a wide variety of industries, including automotive, finance, defense, manufacturing and healthcare. These customers, the company says, are seeing their GPU utilization increase from 25 to 75% on average.

“The new funds enable Run:AI to grow the company in two important areas: first, to triple the size of our development team this year,” the company’s CEO Omri Geller told me. “We have an aggressive roadmap for building out the truly innovative parts of our product vision — particularly around virtualizing AI workloads — a bigger team will help speed up development in this area. Second, a round this size enables us to quickly expand sales and marketing to additional industries and markets.”

Run.AI raises $13M for its distributed machine learning platform

More TechCrunch

Lydia is splitting itself into two apps — Lydia for P2P payments and Sumeria for those looking for a mobile-first bank account.

Lydia, the French payments app with 8 million users, launches mobile banking app Sumeria

Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” This might be port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all…

Shipping logistics startup Harbor Lab raises $16M Series A led by Atomico

AWS has confirmed its European “sovereign cloud” will go live by the end of 2025, enabling greater data residency for the region.

AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads, is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months.

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June