The artificial intelligence development platform Lightning AI was able to raise equity investments worth $50 million.
The mentioned company’s press release, published last Thursday, November 21, contains information that the specified financing was received from Cisco Investments, JPMorgan Chase, K5 Global, and Nvidia. This firm owns the PyTorch Lightning open artificial intelligence framework.
The press release published by the company also contains information that the total funding for Lightning AI will reach $103 million.
Moreover, in a press release, it was noted that historically enterprises have struggled with a fragmented, in-home machine learning infrastructure, which required engineering teams to maintain. Also, the relevant infrastructure was rapidly becoming outdated. Lightning AI eliminates this complexity. The company combines dozens of separate tools into a single multi-cloud platform, offering full, low-, and no—code solutions to train and deploy models, build intelligent agents, code together on cloud graphics processing units, host AI apps, and more – all securely on enterprises’ preferred cloud infrastructure.
Lightning AI was launched 12 months ago. The company currently serves 240,000 users across 2,000 organizations. PyTorch Lightning has been downloaded over 160 million times. The relevant information is contained in the press release.
William Falcon, founder and chief executive officer of Lightning AI, stated that currently building its own artificial intelligence platform is similar to building Slack. According to him, the relevant process is complex, costly, and cannot be described as core for business. He stated that the value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge, and unique models, and not in maintaining the machine intelligence infrastructure.
It’s worth noting that recently there has been an increase in spending enterprises on generative artificial intelligence. The corresponding tendency is related to the fact that companies began to implement AI after using this technology in a test mode.
Venture capital firm Menlo Ventures said this week that its spending on generative artificial intelligence in 2024 reached the $13.8 billion mark. Last year, the corresponding figure was $2.3 billion.
In most cases, organizations deploy three or more foundation models of artificial intelligence.
OpenAI’s share of the enterprise market has decreased from 50% to 34% since last year. At the same time, a similar indicator of another major player in the artificial intelligence industry, which is Anthropic, has grown from 12% to 24%.
As we have reported earlier, Amazon to Invest Another $4 Billion in Anthropic.
