Bitfusion today announced a $5M Series A funding round led by Vanedge Capital, with participation from new investor Sierra Ventures and existing investors Data Collective, Resonant VC, Emergent Ventures, INSEAD Angels and Geekdom. The company also announced the beta availability of Bitfusion Flex, a software product that removes the complexity of clustering, sharing and scaling deep learning infrastructure, making the delivery of artificial intelligence (AI) applications faster and more economical.
Bitfusion Flex significantly reduces the time and expense associated with AI projects by accelerating development times and cutting infrastructure costs. The infrastructure management software allows AI developers to streamline the development and deployment of deep learning applications by dynamically scaling and sharing on-demand compute power.
Bitfusion Flex, powered by the company’s core virtualization engine, optimizes deep learning workflows throughout the AI application lifecycle including development, training, and inference. It can be deployed into any data center or cloud and dramatically enhances the use of GPUs, FPGAs and other AI compute resources across all major deep learning frameworks.
Bitfusion’s core virtualization technology provides a transparent software layer that combines multiple systems into a single elastic compute cluster that supports the sharing and scaling of compute resources. It works out of the box with pre-existing applications and is compatible with bare metal, containerized, and virtualized environments. Bitfusion Flex provides the end-to-end management framework for developers to easily leverage the core virtualization engine across AI applications and environments.
“The promise of AI and deep learning is immense, but in practice, leveraging GPUs, FPGAs and other compute architectures for performance presents huge challenges for AI developers,” said Subbu Rama, co-founder and CEO of Bitfusion. “By providing an end-to-end solution focused on the unique needs around AI development and deployment, we are enabling companies to leverage these efficient architectures with very little effort. This massively accelerates time to business value for AI initiatives.”
Bitfusion’s successful Series A financing demonstrates strong industry support and shows the importance of the growing market for AI infrastructure solutions.
“The data center is moving to a heterogeneous computing model where CPUs are augmented by specialized co-processors such as GPUs, FPGAs, and more,” said Moe Kermani, managing partner at Vanedge Capital. “Machine learning is the major driver of this shift and Bitfusion is well-positioned to simplify how applications take advantage of this heterogeneous environment.”
Bitfusion sees an opportunity to provide tools to manage the machine learning development process while squeezing higher utilization out of the many racks of GPUs needed to do the job,” said Karl Freund, senior analyst for machine learning at Moor Insights & Strategy. “And Bitfusion is the first, to my knowledge, to address this growing need.”
“The latest NVIDIA GPU technology delivered on the IBM Cloud is opening the door for clients of all sizes across all industries to accelerate their strategy around HPC, deep learning and AI,” said Jerry Gutierrez, global HPC solution leader at IBM Cloud. “Bitfusion Flex and IBM are helping clients leverage CPU and GPU technology to develop deep learning and AI solutions.”
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