General Compute Inc., a Covina-based neocloud startup, announced on Tuesday that it raised $100 million in series A funding. The round was co-led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures with additional participation from Santa Monica-based BOLD Capital Partners, Covina-based Village Global and Fuse Venture Partners, among others.
General Compute and neocloud companies like it are having their moment in the spotlight thanks to artificial intelligence. They’re a far cry from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc., which own the lion’s share of the cloud computing market. While legacy hyperscalers are busy managing databases and providing storage for every conceivable internet application, neoclouds’ high-performance, no-frills cloud services are purpose-built to handle AI workloads.
A unique focus
But while most neoclouds today are built to train AI models using massive data sets, General Compute is focusing on inference. The trained model is deployed in real-time settings.
The company is building infrastructure to support chips made specifically for inference and has collected a suite of inference-focused chips from the likes of Positron, Cerebras and SambaNova.
“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,” Finn Puklowski, co-founder and chief executive officer of General Compute, said in a statement. “Our mission is to bridge the gap between the world’s most advanced alternative chips and the companies that desperately need them today.”
The first deployment from General Compute is expected to go live in the first quarter of 2027.
