Lightning AI Valuation, Funding & Investors
Lightning AI is valued at $14M as of December 2019.
Last Lightning AI valuation
$14M
Seed · Dec 2019
Last Lightning AI funding round
$50M
Undisclosed stage · Nov 2024
Cumulative funding Lightning AI raised
$109M
across 4 funding rounds
Key investors in Lightning AI
Index Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures
Firstminute Capital
SV Angel
Coatue
NVIDIA
About Lightning AI
Lightning AI is a platform for building AI models and end-to-end ML systems from PyTorch Lightning origins. New York-headquartered Lightning supports multi-cloud, fault-tolerant apps for research and production. The company raised $18.6 million in Series A funding in 2020 led by Index Ventures.
Founded
2019
HQ
New York City, NYWebsite
Status
Privately held
Customer focus
B2B
Revenue model
Subscription
Valuation
$14M (Dec 2019)
Lightning AI Valuation
Lightning AI is currently valued at $14M, based on its seed round in December 2019.
The $4M round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, SV Angel, Firstminute Capital and Zero Prime Ventures.
Lightning AI valuation by funding round
| Date | Stage | Valuation |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2019 | Seed | $14M |
Lightning AI Funding History
Lightning AI has raised a total of $109M across 4 funding rounds.
Lightning AI's first fundraising round was a $4M seed round in December 2019. The most recent completed round was a $50M undisclosed-stage round in November 2024.
Lightning AI funding rounds
| Date | Stage | Investors | Raised | Valuation | Deal Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2024 | Undisclosed stage | K5 Global; NVIDIA; Cisco Investments; JPMorgan Chase | $50M | - | Lightning AI, creator of the PyTorch Lightning deep learning framework with over 160 million downloads, raised $50 million in an equity funding round on November 21, 2024, from Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, K5 Global, and NVIDIA, bringing total funding to $103 million. The New York-based company, led by founder and CEO William Falcon, provides a unified AI development platform called Lightning AI Studios that simplifies model training, fine-tuning, deployment, and agent building in a multiplayer, cloud-based environment powered by NVIDIA GPUs including H100s. Launched 12 months prior, the platform has attracted 240,000 users across more than 2,000 organizations and enterprises. The funding will accelerate product development, customer acquisition including government clients, platform expansion, and business growth while reducing AI infrastructure complexity and costs. Lightning AI enables users to shorten AI product development from months to weeks, with examples including a Fortune 100 company cutting setup time from 30 days to two days and Columbia University researchers completing hundreds of experiments in 12 hours instead of 60 days. It operates on a pay-as-you-go model with a free tier offering 22 GPU hours per month and private cloud options, positioning it as an operating system for AI akin to AWS for software. PyTorch Lightning underpins leading AI products like NVIDIA's NeMo models and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion. As chair of the PyTorch Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council, Falcon emphasizes focusing on data, domain knowledge, and models rather than infrastructure. The round reflects market recognition of Lightning AI's traction in the enterprise AI tooling space amid surging generative AI spending, which reached $13.8 billion in 2024. |
| Jun 2022 | Series B | Coatue (lead); Index Ventures; Firstminute Capital; Bain Capital Ventures; MANTIS Venture Capital | $40M | - | Lightning AI (formerly Grid.ai), a New York-based company, develops the Lightning AI platform, an open-source tool built on PyTorch Lightning to simplify AI product development, services, and experiences. Lightning AI operates a subscription and usage-based business model for enterprise deployments and maintains a fully remote organization with employees across 18 countries, hubs in New York, London, and San Francisco. In June 2022, it raised $40 million in a Series B round led by Coatue, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Index Ventures, Firstminute Capital, and Mantis Venture Capital (backed by the Chainsmokers), bringing total funding to $58.6 million. Coatue General Partner Caryn Marooney joined the board alongside Index Ventures' Bryan Offutt. The funds were allocated to technology innovation, AI research, and expanding its user community and ecosystem amid a projected global AI market exceeding $500 billion by 2024. Later developments include a 2024 valuation of $315 million after raising a total of $112.2 million across seven rounds, and a January 2026 merger with Voltage Park forming a full-stack AI cloud valued over $2.5 billion with ARR exceeding $500 million, backed by Jed McCaleb's Navigation Fund. |
| Oct 2020 | Series A | Index Ventures (lead); Firstminute Capital; Bain Capital Ventures | $15M | - | Lightning AI (formerly Grid.ai) raised $18.6 million in Series A funding in October 2020 led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Firstminute Capital. The company, founded by William Falcon, builds AI infrastructure tools including PyTorch Lightning and Lightning Apps, enabling developers to build high-performance AI models and end-to-end machine learning systems. The Series A funding supported further product development and platform expansion in the AI software market. |
| Dec 2019 | Seed | Bain Capital Ventures (lead); Index Ventures; SV Angel; Firstminute Capital; Zero Prime Ventures | $4M | $14M | Lightning AI raised a $3.5 million Seed round with a post-money valuation of $13.6 million. Investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Index Ventures, SV Angel, and Zero Prime Ventures, with Bain Capital Ventures as the lead. The company, founded in 2019, develops a platform based on the open-source PyTorch Lightning framework to simplify AI model development, training, and deployment. Lightning AI provides managed cloud-based environments and pre-packaged AI applications for enterprises, reducing infrastructure complexity. The Seed funding supported early development of its commercial offerings around PyTorch Lightning, which has become popular among developers. This round preceded later financings, including an October 2020 Series A of $18.6 million also involving Bain Capital Ventures, Index Ventures, and Firstminute. |
Who has invested in Lightning AI?
11 investors have backed Lightning AI across its funding rounds, including Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Firstminute Capital, SV Angel, Coatue and NVIDIA.
Lead investors include Coatue, Index Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.
Lightning AI Investors
| Investor | HQ | Rounds | Role | First check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 London | 3 | Lead | Dec 2019 | |
| London | 3 | Participant | Dec 2019 | |
| San Francisco, CA | 3 | Lead | Dec 2019 | |
| San Francisco, CA | 1 | Participant | Nov 2024 | |
| San Jose, CA | 1 | Participant | Nov 2024 | |
| San Francisco, CA | 1 | Participant | Dec 2019 | |
| United States | 1 | Participant | Nov 2024 | |
| San Francisco, CA | 1 | Participant | Dec 2019 | |
| New York City, NY | 1 | Participant | Nov 2024 | |
This data is available for Pro users. Sign up to see all 11 Lightning AI investors. Start Free Trial | ||||
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Start Free TrialLightning AI Competitors
Lightning AI competitors include listed companies like Railtown AI Technologies and Teneo AI, and private ones like VerifAI, AIxBlock, Bytez and Six Atomic.
| Company | HQ | Status | Revenue | EBITDA | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco, CA | Private | - | - | $16M | |
| Dover, DE | Private | - | - | $16M | |
| San Francisco, CA | Private | - | - | $16M | |
 Canada | Publicly listed | - | ($4M) | $46M | |
 Singapore | Private | - | - | $14M | |
 Sweden | Publicly listed | $9M | ($4M) | $13M |
Lightning AI Public Comps
Lightning AI is still privately-owned, but its public comps include Teneo AI, Nowigence, Helport AI, Cirata, OODA AI, Ayfie International, Insig AI, Ricksoft Co, Baseig and HeartSciences.
| Last FY | EV/Revenue | EV/EBITDA | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | EBITDA | Last FY | LTM | 2027E | Last FY | LTM | 2027E | |
| $9M | ($4M) | 5.1x | - | (10.6x) | - | |||
| $43K | ($1M) | 376.9x | - | (14.6x) | - | |||
| $35M | $7M | 0.4x | - | 2.0x | - | |||
| $12M | ($11M) | 1.1x | 1.3x | (1.2x) | (3.1x) | |||
| $3M | ($9M) | 3.4x | - | (1.2x) | - | |||
| $1M | ($3M) | 6.8x | - | (3.5x) | - | |||
| $711K | ($8M) | 29.1x | - | (2.6x) | - | |||
| $70M | $3M | - | - | - | - | |||
This data is available for Pro users. Sign up to see all Lightning AI competitors and their valuation data. Start Free Trial | ||||||||
Common questions about Lightning AI
| When was Lightning AI founded? | Lightning AI was founded in 2019. |
| Where is Lightning AI headquartered? | Lightning AI is headquartered in New York City, NY, United States. |
| Is Lightning AI publicly listed? | No, Lightning AI is a private, VC-backed company. |
| What is Lightning AI's valuation? | Lightning AI was last valued at $14M in its seed round in December 2019. |
| How much funding has Lightning AI raised? | Lightning AI has raised $109M across 4 funding rounds. |
| What was Lightning AI's last funding round? | Lightning AI's last funding round was a $50M undisclosed-stage round in November 2024. |
| Who are Lightning AI's investors? | Lightning AI's investors include Index Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, K5 Global, NVIDIA, SV Angel, Cisco Investments, Zero Prime Ventures, JPMorgan Chase, Coatue and 1 other. |
| Which companies are comparable to Lightning AI? | Companies comparable to Lightning AI include VerifAI, AIxBlock, Bytez, Railtown AI Technologies, Six Atomic and Teneo AI. |
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