Lightning AI Raises $50 Million for PyTorch Artificial Intelligence Framework

Artificial intelligence (AI) development platform Lightning AI has obtained a $50 million equity investment.

The company, maker of the PyTorch Lightning open AI framework, announced the investment — from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global and Nvidia — in a news release Thursday (Nov. 21), saying it brings its total funding to $103 million.

“Historically, enterprises have struggled with fragmented, in-house ML [machine learning] infrastructure requiring teams of engineers to maintain, which quickly becomes outdated,” the release said. “Lightning AI eliminates this complexity by unifying dozens of separate tools into one, multi-cloud platform, offering full, low-, and no-code solutions to train and deploy models, build intelligent agents, code together on cloud GPUs, host AI apps and more — all securely on enterprises’ preferred cloud infrastructure.”

Launched 12 months ago, Lightning AI has gained 240,000 users across 2,000 organizations, with PyTorch Lightning being downloaded more than 160 million times, the release said.

“Building your own AI platform today is like building your own Slack — it’s complex, costly and not core to your business,” said William Falcon, Founder and CEO of Lightning AI. “The value for enterprises lies in their data, domain knowledge and unique models  —not in maintaining AI infrastructure.”

The funding comes during the closing weeks of a year that has seen enterprise spending on generative AI increase sixfold, as businesses began incorporating the technology after first experimenting with it.

This spending reached $13.8 billion, compared to $2.3 billion last year, venture capital firm Menlo Ventures announced earlier this week.

“2024 marks the year that generative AI became a mission-critical imperative for enterprise,” Joff Redfern, partner at Menlo, said in a news release. “The numbers tell a dramatic story of organizations moving beyond pilots to embedding AI at the core of their business strategies.”

The VC outfit said that 72% of enterprise IT decision-makers from companies with at least 50 employees expect to see wider adoption of generative AI “in the near term,” the release said.

At the same time, these officials said the transformation is not yet large in scale, as companies are seeking high-value use cases for the technology.

Menlo’s findings are in line with research by PYMNTS Intelligence, which shows that 78% of chief financial officers say that their companies plan to increase spending on generative AI.