Lambda, a cloud computing company specializing in providing hardware and services for artificial intelligence development, has secured $480 million in a Series D equity round. This funding was raised from investors, including Nvidia, according to the company's statement to Reuters.
The round was co-led by Andra Capital and SGW, the family office of early Google investor Scott Hassan, bringing the total equity raised by Lambda to $863 million. Although the company did not disclose its valuation, sources indicate that this round resulted in a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion. Other participants in the funding round were ARK Invest, G Squared, and servers provider Super Micro.
Lambda's offerings include cloud services and software tailored for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models. The company rents out servers powered by Nvidia’s AI GPUs, capitalizing on the increased demand for such hardware in the current AI surge. Additionally, Lambda provides software and hosted access for enterprises to run various AI models, including open source options.
CEO and co-founder Stephen Balaban highlighted Lambda's strategic position to leverage open source AI models like DeepSeek-R1. He emphasized the company's capacity, boasting over 25,000 GPUs on their cloud platform that can readily host these models.
The recent launch of DeepSeek-R1 has boosted demand for Nvidia H200 chips among Lambda's clients, with enterprises pre-purchasing significant quantities of Lambda's H200 capacity ahead of its public release. Balaban mentioned that the new investment would support acquiring more Nvidia chips, expanding software products such as the Model Inference API, and advancing their Chat AI Assistant.
Established in 2012 by a team of AI engineers, Lambda caters to over 5,000 customers in various sectors, including manufacturing, financial services, and the U.S. government, through their hardware and cloud services.