New York-based company Grid AI, also known as PyTorch Lightning, raised US$ 18.6M in Series A funding round on 8th October 2020.
The Series A funding round was led by Index Ventures. Other participants in the round include Bain Capital Ventures and Firstminute.
Grid Ai has 25 employees currently. The funds raised will be utilized to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Grid AI aims to build a diverse team.
About Grid AI
Founded in 2020 by Luis Capelo and William Falcon, Grid AI is a startup that enables training state-of-the-art AI models on hundreds of cloud GPUs and TPUs from their laptops. The co-founder, William Falcon is the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project that aims to help machine learning engineers work more efficiently. Luis Capelo was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier.
Grid teaches machine learning to engineers, data scientists, and AI researchers. Their main goal is for the product to be user friendly so companies don’t have to worry about the machines they are running or clusters, and instead can focus on delivering value for their customers. Grid is a platform for training models that enables rapid research iteration. It aims to simplify scalable AI research so that when a network becomes complex, the code doesn’t.
“Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor have the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.” said Luis Falcon.
What investors have to say
“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.” said Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon.
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