General Compute has raised $100 million in Series A funding led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, the company said, even as the neocloud sector faces a turbulent stretch on Wall Street. The round values the startup at $800 million post-money, up from a $60 million valuation after its May seed round. The financing was made possible in part by a deal with a large customer worth $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
The raise lands in a difficult week for the category. CoreWeave, a publicly traded neocloud that rents out computing power for AI, has seen its stock fall to a 12-month low. Elon Musk is flexing $40 billion in debt to buy computing capacity and has predicted that more than 200 neoclouds will face consolidation.
General Compute co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski is not rattled. He is bullish on CoreWeave's prospects and said Musk is talking his book to push down prices for the GPUs he wants to buy. Puklowski added that fears of a chip-led collapse are massively overstated, and that people contact him every week asking for TPUs, GPUs or any chip to get more compute. He also pointed to Anthropic's bullish S-1 as a factor settling fears for now.
The company has carved out a niche by building its cloud on specialized inference chips from Nvidia rivals. General Compute struck a $400 million deal to buy new chips from SambaNova, the first debt financing of inference chips, and has since added Positron and Cerebras to its supplier portfolio. Rather than constructing large data centers, it uses smaller power sources, rents space in other companies' data centers and converts former bitcoin-mining sites into locations for running AI models.
That approach keeps General Compute out of the top ranks of neoclouds for now, but it also avoids the constraints of building data centers from scratch. Puklowski expects the company to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027 and suspects it will have access to 200 megawatts of power, more than it can likely fund and get hardware for. He said financing will remain a full-time job on both the debt and equity sides.
General Compute's customers include cloud companies that offer developers high-speed inference, for which it provides bare metal servers with no software layered on top. James Palmer, a principal at Blackbird who co-led the round, said his firm's confidence stems partly from an investment in Baseten, an inference cloud company whose growth he has observed over the last 10 months, along with demand for open weight inference and for companies owning their own intelligence. He said Cerebras, Positron and SambaNova all need distribution partners who can take them to scale and navigate the physical world, and executives at all three chipmakers praised General Compute's focus on making the economics of AI cloud compute work.
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