Lightning AI (previously known as Grid.ai), a New York-based provider of a an AI platform that unifies the full AI/ML development and infrastructure lifecycle, raised $40M in Series B funding.
The round, which brings the total raised to date to $58.6 million, was led by Coatue with participation from Index, Bain, First Minute Capital, and the Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC. Coatue General Partner Caryn Marooney joined the board of directors, which also includes Index Ventures Partner Bryan Offutt.
The company intends to use the capital to accelerate technology innovation, fund new AI research, and invest in its user community and ecosystem.
Led by CEO William Falcon, Lightning AI streamlines the lifecycle of machine learning development to expand widespread AI adoption. Its aim is to enable individual and enterprise users to build deployment-ready AI tools without having to hire experts or sink resources into in-house infrastructure. Lightning AI allows researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to build, share and iterate on highly scalable, production-ready AI apps using the tools and technologies of their choice, regardless of their expertise. To solve any kind of AI problem from research to deployment and production-ready pipelines, users can group components of their choice into a Lightning App and customize the underlying code as needed. Lightning Apps can then be republished back into the community for future use, or kept private in users’ personal libraries.
FinSMEs
17/06/2022