Thunder Compute, a San Francisco-based startup, announced today it has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and CEAS Investments. The company aims to address the GPU capacity shortage by virtualizing the estimated $200 billion of idle compute resources currently sitting unused in data centers worldwide.
The funding will enable Thunder Compute to scale its proprietary GPU virtualization software, which treats GPUs as network resources and operates invisibly beneath workloads to boost data center efficiency. By doing so, the company seeks to increase average GPU utilization, which currently hovers at a mere five percent, according to the company.
“Our mission is to put idle GPUs back to work,” said Carl Peterson, co-founder and CEO of Thunder Compute. “With this investment, we can partner with enterprises to virtualize GPUs at scale, unlocking untapped capacity and reducing the need for new hardware purchases.”
The company’s software is designed to be transparent to existing applications, allowing data centers to pool their GPU resources and allocate them dynamically based on demand. This approach not only maximizes efficiency but also reduces operational costs and environmental impact by extending the lifecycle of existing hardware.
The Series A round comes at a time when demand for GPUs, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, far outstrips supply. Major cloud providers and enterprises face long lead times for new GPU shipments, making the ability to utilize existing resources more critical than ever.
Thunder Compute was founded in 2022 by Carl Peterson, previously a management consultant at Bain & Company, and Brian Model, a former quantitative developer at Citadel Securities. The company has developed its technology with a focus on enterprise-grade reliability and security, ensuring that virtualized GPUs meet the performance and compliance requirements of large organizations.
“We are thrilled to support Thunder Compute in their mission to eliminate GPU waste,” said a partner at Matrix Partners. “Their innovative approach has the potential to transform data center economics and address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in the AI era.”
The funding will be used to expand the engineering team, accelerate product development, and forge partnerships with data center operators and cloud providers. Thunder Compute also plans to enhance its platform’s capabilities, including support for a wider range of GPU architectures and more sophisticated workload orchestration.
For more information about Thunder Compute and its technology, visit https://www.thundercompute.com/.
