AI infrastructure startup General Compute has raised $100 million in Series A funding, co-led by Blackbird and Abstract.
Fuse Venture Partners and Village Global also participated in the round, alongside Bold Capital, QED Fund, 645 Ventures, Carbide Ventures, Uncorrelated Fund, Endeavor Catalyst, Icehouse Ventures, MatterScale, Carya, Plug and Play, and angel investors.
The company is building an AI inference cloud for "ultra-fast tokens," financing, deploying, and operating GPUs and purpose-built inference chips from Cerebras, SambaNova, and Positron AI to provide companies with access on-demand via a flexible contract.
"Customers get dedicated bare metal or a guaranteed tokens-per-second SLA without having to procure or manage the infrastructure themselves," the firm said, announcing the news on Tuesday.
$800 million valuation
The funding adds to the firm's previously announced $400 million debt facility from Upper90 to finance its neocloud buildout, and $15 million seed round in May. The company is now valued at $800 million post-money, according to TechCrunch.
General Compute's first major deployments are set to go live in the first quarter of next year, with more than 50 MW of capacity in the pipeline, as the company looks to meet surging demand for AI inference, citing Goldman Sachs estimates of a 24x increase in capacity requirements by 2030.
"The era of one-size-fits-all AI hardware is over. As inference becomes the largest and most complex workload in computing, the future belongs to specialized silicon," General Compute co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski said. "Our mission is to bridge the gap between the world's most advanced alternative chips and the companies that desperately need them today."