A former Research Scientist from Google’s DeepMind deep learning team, Jared Quincy Davis, has launched Foundry Technologies, a cloud platform backed by $80 million in funding.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the startup is dedicated to developing a public cloud specifically designed for machine learning (ML) workloads. Davis stated, “AI accelerator compute is arguably the most critical resource in civilization today, so the bottlenecks here reverberate broadly. While the much-discussed GPU shortage is part of the challenge we face, it’s not the only issue. Arguably, the industry suffers vastly more from under-utilization than from under-supply. The work we are doing at Foundry is addressing this from multiple angles.”

The $80 million investment round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Redpoint, Microsoft Ventures (M12), Conviction, NEA, and others. This funding round reportedly valued the company at $350 million.

Davis, who serves as the CEO and founder of Foundry, previously worked as a research scientist at Google’s DeepMind deep learning team. Alongside Zaharia and other team members, including former DeepMind alumni and Stanford University computer science PhD program scientists, Davis is driving the company forward.

Foundry utilizes high-performance data center GPUs, including Nvidia H100s, along with other smaller variants. While specifics about its hosting infrastructure remain undisclosed, the platform enables users to seamlessly scale their AI workloads as needed.

With a valuation of $350 million, Foundry aims to provide companies with availability, elasticity, price performance, simplicity, security, and resiliency. The emergence of Foundry and its substantial backing signal a flourishing AI cloud market with growing investor confidence. Despite the presence of established players like AWS and Azure in the AI Cloud arena, Foundry’s DeepMind pedigree may offer it an advantage in specific research areas.