Deep learning GPU cloud services and computing hardware maker Lambda has raised US$24.5 million in financing in a bid to continue driving development towards standardising data centre scale power to laptop users.

Primary investors included 1517, Gradient Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Razer, and Georges Harik. The debt facility is provided by Silicon Valley Bank.

Except for Razer, which participated in the round as a strategic investor, all major funding parties were existing Lambda investors.

This financing round consists of a $15 million Series A equity round and a $9.5 million debt facility provided by Silicon Valley Bank.

The company said it will use the capital to expand its cloud and software engineering teams, pay for fixed assets related to its cloud business, and as working capital for its deep learning hardware business.

Stephen Balaban, co-founder, and CEO of Lambda, said: “Fortune 500 companies, startups, and universities are forced to build huge teams to administer the compute resources required to train deep learning models.

“We want to build a world where a single researcher can manage petaflops of GPU compute. A world where training a model on a data centre scale computer is as easy as training a model on your laptop.”

Lambda’s Board of Directors includes Robert Youngjohns and Zach Bratun-Glennon, Partner at Gradient Ventures.

Robert was previously the EVP and GM of HP Software at HPE and, before that, President of Microsoft North America. He has also held senior leadership roles at Callidus Cloud, Sun Microsystems, and IBM.

The full list of current investors and advisors to Lambda include 1517 Fund, Gradient Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Razer, Scott McNealy, Austin Russell, Georges Harik, James Hong, James Cham, Jun Hong Heng, Nicolas Pinto, Gary Bradski, Ken Patchett, Randy Ching, Keller Rinaudo, and others.

Lambda provides Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning infrastructure to organizations like Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon Research, Tencent, Kaiser Permanente, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech and the US Department of Defense.