Hyperbolic Raises $30M for a Global GPU Compute Grid

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Hyperbolic, an AI infrastructure startup based in San Francisco, has raised $30 million in a Series A-1 round. Walden Catalyst led it. The venture firm was co-founded by Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and former Samsung president Young Sohn.

The round lifts Hyperbolic's total funding to $50 million. Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital and Salience Capital also invested. Angels include executives and founders linked to Citadel Securities, the New York Stock Exchange, and GPU cloud providers WhiteFiber and Vector Core Compute.

One platform for scattered GPUs

The company wants to connect underused GPUs across hundreds of cloud providers. Its aim is to give AI companies access to compute without managing accounts with many vendors. The GPU cloud market now spans more than 300 providers, each with different hardware, networking and software.

Hyperbolic says its platform already supports more than 250,000 AI developers. Customers include teams at Modal, Higgsfield, Daytona, HeyGen and Pika, as well as researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

At the centre is Forge, a control plane that lets customers provision, manage and move AI workloads across clouds. It hides the technical differences between individual GPU suppliers behind one interface.

Hyperbolic works with roughly 30 specialized AI cloud providers. About $200 million in annual compute capacity is connected to its platform, according to Business Insider reporting.

Higgsfield, an AI video startup, said Hyperbolic helped it secure Nvidia H100 GPUs for production inference. The company then moved to a reserved contract at a rate 35% below on-demand pricing.

"The demand for AI compute will continue to grow, but adding more hardware is only part of the answer," said Lip-Bu Tan of Walden Catalyst. He added that the value of that investment depends on how effectively capacity is put to work and made available to the teams that need it.

A marketplace on the roadmap

Hyperbolic plans a Global Compute Grid, where customers could buy, sell and resell eligible capacity. Spot pricing and market-making tools are in development. They could let buyers and suppliers hedge against swings in compute prices. These financial services remain on the roadmap and are not an established market.

Founder and CEO Jasper Zhang holds a mathematics doctorate from UC Berkeley, finished in two years. He researched at Berkeley AI Research, where limited GPU access constrained experiments. He later worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities, focused on market making.

The new funding will go to Forge, multi-cloud orchestration, managed AI services and the planned marketplace.

Source: Tech Startups