The traffic volume entering training and running AI quickly became a major cost and resource headache for the organization. Today, AC Cast AI is a startup building tool that simplifies and optimizes the workloads of automated AI and other tasks, and is raising a lot of money and building strong growth and partnerships with key players in the field.

The company has raised $108 million in the Series C C, which will use more R&D at the same time and expand its business in core markets such as the U.S. and elsewhere. Sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the company's company valuation is "near unicorn" after currency - the company is close to $900 million compared to what I understand.

“It’s all about GPU, computing and electricity,” said Yuri Frayman, the actor CEO and co-founder. "Our games are about making sure we create efficiency and can promote more work in the GPU. That's what we mean."

In the context, when Cast Last raises funds, $35 million in November 2023, the currency after each sale is sold at $300 million. The startup raised more than $86 million ahead of this round.

AI Cast AI is located in Miami, Florida but is “located in Europe”, which Frayman describes as an “European company” with much of its development taking place in Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

It has accumulated 2,100 customers over the last three years of its business. Companies like Akamai, BMW, FICO, Huggingface, Nielseniq, and Swisscom all use their technology to analyze cloud and on-premises capabilities and find the best cost-performance ratio to allocate computational workload. Frayman said it integrates with all the major cloud providers and anything else customers may use.

As companies face a shortage of processors that cannot train and run AI models, people are in great need of better resource allocation. Cast AI cited its own research, claiming that on average only 10% of CPU and 23% of memory are exploited, and that the same is GPU usage.

The Series C, both small and small, highlights other work the startup is developing and the work with whom it works with.

G2 Venture Partners and Soft Bank Vision Fund 2 are taking the lead together. Aglaé Ventures (the investment company of LVMH Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault) and former backers Hedosophia, Cota Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Creandum and unrelated Ventures are also participating.

Notably, Frayman noted that the oversubscribed round kept the company in the same portfolio with OpenAI and AI infrastructure provider Crusoe Energy, two companies working on large-scale interstellar AI infrastructure projects with Softbank, Oracle and others.

Freeman said his company has already put many of these companies in partnership and customers. "We are working with Crusoe, and in their stack, we are working with SoftBank to be able to promote the efficiency of its AI data centers," he said. He added that the startup is also part of a large project between OpenAI and Softbank, which can build services in Japan. “We are working with the entire ecosystem,” he added.

Today, AI Cast AI is doing a lot with AI, but that's not where the company starts. Ukraine-born Frayman started the company with Leon Kuperman and Laurent Gil in 2019, and he started his career before moving to software development.

Back in 2006, he and Gil built one of what Frayman calls "the earliest machine learning startups." There, they built some of the earliest applications that used NVIDIA GPUs to train classifiers for image search. “That’s how far we go in understanding the power of machine learning,” he said.

The company will eventually be acquired by Google.

The three founders then worked on the cloud-based cybersecurity startup Zenedge, which was inspired by Cast - they worked hard to control cloud costs as they scale. (Zeneedge was eventually acquired by Oracle.)

The first use case of Cast AI was born from their experience in the resource struggle. Although Cast has always been “AI” in its name and spirit, it is about its application, especially making the use and distribution of the cloud more efficient for Kubernetes’ workloads.

Kubernetes applications remain at the heart of startups, both in terms of revenue and spirit (if you visit their website, you will also see prominent messages there). But it was the surge in activity around AI where all the buzz and growth was flowing - two clients and investor.

"As infrastructure demand surges, AI is setting new standards for cloud efficiency," Tim Yap, investment director at SoftBank Investment Advisor, said in a statement.

"Everyone is talking about AI agents around the world," said Carl Fritjofsson, general partner at Creandum. "Before we started talking about this technology, the actors were AI agents.