Scott Hassan Family Office Invests in Lambda’s $480M Series D

Silicon Valley-based AI cloud computing company Lambda has secured a massive $480 million in a Series D funding round, positioning itself as a major contender in the rapidly evolving AI infrastructure space. Among the leading investors is SGW, the family office of Scott Hassan, an early Google investor known for his deep ties to technology and robotics innovation. The round also saw participation from Andra Capital, ARK Invest, G Squared, and Super Micro, alongside strategic investors such as OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, Fincadia Advisors, In-Q-Tel, and key server manufacturers Pegatron, Wistron, Wiwynn, and Supermicro. This latest investment brings Lambda’s total equity raised to $863 million, with a reported valuation of $2.5 billion post-money.

Funding round used for new Nvidia GPUs

The fresh capital injection will primarily be directed toward acquiring additional Nvidia GPUs, scaling Lambda’s cloud infrastructure, and advancing its suite of AI software solutions. Among its flagship products is the Model Inference API, enabling businesses to deploy AI models at scale, and an upcoming Chat AI Assistant designed for enterprise applications.

Lambda is actively expanding its reach beyond cloud services by helping enterprises deploy Nvidia-powered servers within their own data centers. In a significant step toward sustainable AI computing, the company recently installed a GB200 NVL72 rack at ECL’s hydrogen-powered data center in Mountain View, California.

Founded in 2012, Lambda has established itself as a go-to provider of high-performance AI computing, catering to developers and enterprises with its dedicated GPU cloud services. Operating from data centers in San Francisco, Allen (Texas), and a new site in Vernon, California, the company specializes in renting out Nvidia GPU-powered servers, a crucial resource for the exponential growth of generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

Lambda’s approach diverges from industry giants like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure by embracing an AI-first infrastructure tailored to open-source AI development. Its recent partnership with DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese open-source AI model, highlights this commitment. With over 25,000 GPUs on its cloud platform, Lambda is well-positioned to support large-scale AI workloads, including those involving Nvidia’s latest H200 chips, which customers are pre-purchasing in anticipation of their release. “Lambda is scaling infrastructure and software, enabling AI developers to train, fine-tune, and deploy models faster and easier than ever,” said Stephen Balaban, CEO and co-founder of Lambda.

Scott Hassan: the family office of an early-stage Google contributor

The involvement of Scott Hassan’s family office in Lambda’s funding round is a noteworthy development given his deep roots in AI and robotics. Hassan, a media-shy billionaire and an original contributor to Google’s search engine code, has long been fascinated by the intersection of AI and physical systems.

In 2006, he founded Willow Garage, a robotics research lab that produced the PR2 humanoid robot, a pivotal platform in AI and robotics research. The PR2 made headlines for its ability to read internet recipes and autonomously prepare pancakes, as well as perform various tasks like making lattes, playing pool, and even scooping dog waste.

Hassan’s passion for robotics extended to Suitable Technologies, where he developed the Beam, a video conferencing robot that allows users to control a screen on wheels remotely. The Beam gained notoriety for its use by figures like Edward Snowden, demonstrating how technology can bridge physical and digital spaces.

Source: Startupstorymedia (25.02.2025)
Picture Source: Getty Images (25.02.2025)

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