Lightning AI, creator of the PyTorch Lightning framework, announced a $50 million equity investment from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global and NVIDIA, bringing total funding to $103 million.
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Since launching 12 months ago, Lightning AI has gained 240,000 users across 2,000 organizations, with PyTorch Lightning surpassing 160 million downloads. Lightning’s multiplayer, cloud-based, persistent development environments make AI development – model finetuning, deploying, agent building, etc – as intuitive as using the iPhone.
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Lightning frees enterprises and developers from the burden and expense of building complex platforms while still integrating with all their favorite ML tools like Open AI, VSCode and many others.
Lightning also offers pay-as-you-go pricing, with a free tier that includes 22 GPU hours per month, and enterprise options to deploy on private clouds with SOC2, HIPAA, and more.
Among its many customer success stories, Lightning AI recently helped a fortune 100 company cut infrastructure setup time from 30 days to two and enabled Columbia researchers to finish hundreds of experiments in 12 hours instead of 60 days.
Historically, enterprises have struggled with fragmented, in-house ML infrastructure requiring teams of engineers to maintain, which quickly becomes outdated. 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.
All of this is delivered in a seamless, user-friendly experience loved by 240K+ AI developers, and powered by NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, including H100s. Lightning enables organizations to build and deploy AI in weeks not months, helping organizations iterate quickly despite a daily changing AI landscape.
Lightning AI proves that standardized solutions can be both adaptable and scalable while retaining the flexibility of custom platforms. With over 160 million downloads, PyTorch Lightning has shown that simplicity and flexibility can coexist, overcoming developer skepticism.
“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.”
“We have thousands of developers single-handedly training and deploying models at a scale that would have required teams of developers without Lightning,” said Falcon.
As this year’s chair of the PyTorch Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council, Lightning AI continues to lead innovation in AI tooling. AI, or Software 2.0, requires a paradigm shift from traditional software development because it requires many GPUs, massive datasets, and collaborative workflows. Just as AWS became the foundation for Software 1.0, Lightning AI is positioned to be the foundational platform for Software 2.0.
About Lightning AI
Lightning AI is the company behind PyTorch Lightning, a widely adopted deep learning framework with over 160 million downloads. Lightning AI simplifies and accelerates AI development by providing a unified platform for training, deploying, and scaling AI. Its flagship product, Lightning AI Studios, integrates tools for model fine-tuning, deployment, agent building, and more. Designed for both simplicity and extensibility, Lightning AI enables enterprises and developers to build deployment-ready AI products in weeks not months, while reducing infrastructure complexity and costs.
