Jared Quincy Davis first faced a shortage of GPUs (powerful chips that run AI systems) as a computer science PhD student at Stanford, when he had to use Google Sheets to reserve time slots on a block of hardware. A former research scientist on Google DeepMind's deep learning team, Davis started Foundry in 2022 to provide AI builders access to cloud-based GPUs, just as bottlenecks had begun to emerge on the supply of compute. Backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, M12 Ventures, NEA, Redpoint and others, Foundry has raised $80 million in venture funding. Davis also chairs Foundry Institute, a nonprofit that aims to address the gaps in compute resources available to academia.
