Cloud infrastructure is dominated by several large industry players: AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud. While AI is moving in a similar direction to some, the founders of Palasler believe that AI infrastructure will look very different and are betting on the fate of their company.
paratrooper Working with dozens of providers, we provide on-demand GPUs for companies and businesses looking to build AI models and applications. Parasail allows customers to use hardware, including NVIDIA’s H100, H200, A100 and 4090 GPUs, a fraction of the current fee charged, the company said.
“Basically there are three cloud vendors running the internet, and that’s not how the internet is rebuilding when you look at AI,” Tim Harris, one of Parasail’s co-founders and CEO of Swift Navigation, told TechCrunch. “It’s much more scattered. The calculations are more accessible and fluent, so you can actually run it inherently with a more level of nature, which is really what we’re going to do.”
“We don’t want a world where the masses control the soup to nuts,” Harris added.
Harris and Parasail CEO Mike Henry had an idea about the startup a few years ago. Groq’s former CPO Henry told TechCrunch that he spent a long time thinking about what it needed to build an AI infrastructure that could compete with Nvidia. He said he saw an opportunity to act horizontally when he realized that the AI infrastructure was quickly built by a large number of players.
According to Henry, innovative fast editing that happens in AI hardware makes it difficult for companies to keep up.
“We have to really focus on how we do it [this] As simple as possible? “They hardly keep up with the open source model,” Henry said. ”
Harris and Henry hired an engineering team in 2023 and began building the company in early 2024.
Today, there are many suppliers seeking to help businesses and other companies build and expand their AI products. From advanced standards like Nvidia and Microsoft to startups Together and Lepton AIcustomers have many choices.
The founders of Parasail do not think they are all the same.
Henry said, of course, all of these vendors offer GPU and AI infrastructure, but he believes that the proprietary technology that Palasler runs under the hood can help it stand out. This technology is what connects Parasail’s GPUs together from various sources.
Wednesday marked the official launch of its platform, but Parasail has partnered with dozens of clients, including Initic, Weights & Biases and Rasa. The company also raised $10 million from a seed round in 2024, with the investment company participating from underlying businesses, Threshold Ventures, Buckley Ventures and Black Opal Ventures.
To gain meaningful market share, Parasail will have to fight alongside Hyperscalers and bet on the continued growth of demand for GPUs. There is reason to believe it will, but there are signs – Microsoft cancels some data center contracts – The predictions around the required AI infrastructure may be a bit exaggerated.
“We don’t think there is actually an end point [to] Demand,” Harris said. “It is really hard for customers to do this – it is hard to scale AI. Now, these models are reaching a place [companies] You can grab open source models and run them almost, but you can access the GPU, access the data center, all the optimizations… we can do this by clicking a button. ”
