TrueFoundry, a startup founded by a group of former Meta engineers, has raised $19 million in fresh investment led by Intel Capital to help enterprises deploy AI systems at scale. The funding will be utilized to expand the team, invest in partnerships, and launch new products, including an AI agent that will help suggest the right resources and enable auto-scaling.

The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) has led to a surge in demand for AI adoption among enterprises of all sizes. However, GenAI relies on large language models that require significant compute power, making GPU optimization essential. TrueFoundry addresses this challenge with its software, available under a platform-as-a-service model, targeting full-stack data scientists. The platform provides features such as auto-scaling, proactive maintenance, centralized access controls, and real-time monitoring to simplify end-to-end AI deployments.

Founded in June 2021 by former Meta engineers Nikunj Bajaj, Abhishek Choudhary, and Anuraag Gutgutia, TrueFoundry initially offered a cross-cloud native software to speed up machine learning deployments. However, as GenAI became mainstream in 2023, the startup modified its system to support GenAI capabilities. According to Gutgutia, TrueFoundry's system enables data scientists to build and test complex AI systems at scale before handing them over to the platform team for final deployments.

TrueFoundry's autopilot system, which uses AI to optimize GPU usage and fix memory requirements, has already demonstrated impressive results. One of its customers, with a small team of two people, managed 10 million requests per second using the autopilot system. The startup has 30 paid customers worldwide, including GPU giant NVIDIA, med-tech company Resmed, Siemens Healthineers, Automation Anywhere, Games24x7, and Whatfix, among others.

The startup's software is architectured using Kubernetes, making it multi-cloud ready and compatible with all major cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, among others. Enterprises can also deploy the platform natively on-premise. According to Bajaj, enterprises using TrueFoundry have built and launched their internal AI platforms in two months and achieved their ROI in four months, unlike the industry average of 14 months.

TrueFoundry's solution has delivered customers with around 40-50% cost reduction on infrastructure spends, along with a 10× deployment speed improvement, regardless of whether they are working on an agent, RAG, a complex deep learning model, or a fine-tuned model. While cloud vendors have started offering their own software to ease the building and deployment of AI models, Gutgutia believes that TrueFoundry's solution is still pertinent as it helps "accelerate the usage of compute" for cloud providers, speed up the time-to-market for AI apps, and reduce their overall costs.

The all-equity Series A round saw participation from Eniac Ventures, Peak XV Partners, and Jump Capital, as well as angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Mohit Aron, and Cyan Bainster. With the fresh funding, TrueFoundry has raised over $21 million in total, including the $2.3 million in its seed round in September 2022 led by Peak XV's (then Sequoia India) Surge.

TrueFoundry quadrupled its customer base last year and deployed over 1,000 clusters across clients for ML workloads. The startup is currently at "north of $1.5 million ARR" and is looking to double down this year. With its latest funding, TrueFoundry is well-positioned to continue simplifying AI deployments for enterprises and driving the adoption of GenAI capabilities.