Applied Compute

AI Infrastructure · Enterprise AI · Cloud Computing

Funding

Applied Compute raises $350M at $3.25B valuation led by Elad Gil

Investors are rewarding AI infrastructure startups that can already show real revenue, not just a roadmap.

• Applied Compute raised $350 million in new funding at a $3.25 billion valuation, led by angel investor Elad Gil with participation from Nvidia, Shopify Ventures and HubSpot Ventures, among others.
• Founded in 2025 by former OpenAI researchers Yash Patil, Rhythm Garg and Linden Li, the company trains and deploys custom AI models tuned to each enterprise customer's own data.
• Its platform uses asynchronous reinforcement learning, which lets data-generation and weight-update steps run simultaneously instead of waiting on each other, speeding up model training.
• Applied Compute hit $100 million in annualized revenue run rate less than 18 months after founding, and has more than doubled its enterprise customer count since its last raise.
• Its AC Inference service now serves more than 1 trillion tokens a day, and customers have run over 1,700 training jobs on its AC2 platform since July.
• Customers include Microsoft, Shopify, DoorDash, Harvey and Clay; for Clay, a custom-trained routing model cut production inference costs by up to 47% without hurting quality.
• Applied Compute plans to use the capital to expand compute capacity, grow its research-heavy team, and accelerate enterprise deployment of its training-and-inference stack.
• The round underscores how fast investors now reward AI infrastructure startups that can pair cutting-edge research pedigree with demonstrated, rapidly scaling enterprise revenue.