AI niche map
AI infrastructure companies that raised in the last 12 months
Started September 27, 2026 · Updated September 27, 2026 · Press Pool
Companies selling the layers other AI products run on: GPU clouds and neoclouds, inference and model-serving platforms, training data and web data for AI, evaluation, observability and testing for AI, vector and AI-native databases, and infrastructure for AI agents. Press Pool has verified 30 companies on this map so far. Each entry is taken from the company's own website and confirmed by an independent source, both linked on the entry. No company pays to be listed.
| Company | What it does | Latest announced financing | Cited in the Machine Relations Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crusoe | Crusoe is a vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider that builds its own AI factories and runs Crusoe Cloud on top of them. | $3.9 billion, Series F (initial closing) (September 17, 2026) | Cited in 2 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Nscale | Nscale is a full-stack AI cloud platform spanning software, compute and power, from AI training and inference to data centers. | $3.36 billion, Pre-IPO convertible notes (September 25, 2026) | Cited in 4 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Fireworks AI | Fireworks is a platform where companies train, customize and serve open models, with an inference engine tuned for throughput and latency. | $1.505 billion, Series D (July 16, 2026) | Cited in 7 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Baseten | Baseten is an AI inference company that post-trains and serves customers' models at production scale, with a focus on latency, reliability and cost. | $1.5 billion, Series F (June 22, 2026) | Cited in 1 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Lambda | Lambda is an AI cloud, which it calls the Superintelligence Cloud, that provides GPU supercomputers for training and inference. | over $1.5B, Series E (November 18, 2025) | Cited in 6 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Fluidstack | Fluidstack builds and deploys large-scale compute infrastructure for leading AI labs. | $830M, Series A (July 20, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Together AI | Together AI runs an AI-native cloud: a full-stack platform for inference, fine-tuning and GPU clusters built around open models. | $800 million, Series C (July 1, 2026) | Cited in 5 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Modal | Modal is a cloud built for AI, giving developers primitives for workloads such as low-latency elastic inference. | $355 million, Series C (May 21, 2026) | Cited in 10 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Mercor | Mercor organizes human experts to power the AI economy, offering expert work for AI labs, custom evals and the APEX benchmarks of frontier-model performance. | $350M, Series C (October 27, 2025) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Snorkel AI | Snorkel AI builds expert-curated datasets and environments that AI labs, enterprises and government agencies use to train and evaluate models. | $350 million, Series E (September 22, 2026) | Cited in 14 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| TensorWave | TensorWave is an all-AMD AI cloud for high-performance, memory-intensive training and inference workloads. | $350 million, Series B (June 10, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Exa | Exa offers search over a large index of public web and private information, delivered through APIs built for AI agents. | $250M, Series C (May 20, 2026) | Cited in 1 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Verda | Verda, formerly DataCrunch, is a full-stack AI cloud company that runs its own data centers, hardware and platform to provide on-demand compute for AI. | $189 million (€163 million), Series B plus additional investment (September 22, 2026) | Cited in 2 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Inferact | Inferact was founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM to grow it as an AI inference engine and make inference cheaper and faster. | $150 million, Seed (January 22, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| LMArena | Arena runs a public AI ranking and LLM leaderboard and positions itself as an evaluation platform for frontier AI. | $150M, Series A (January 6, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| fal | fal is a generative media platform that runs 1,000+ image, video, audio and 3D models through APIs, serverless deployment and GPU compute. | $140 million, Series D (December 9, 2025) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| LangChain | LangChain builds a platform for agent engineering, spanning its open-source agent frameworks and the LangSmith platform for testing and improving agents with production data. | $125M, Series B (October 20, 2025) | Cited in 19 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Parallel Web Systems | Parallel builds web infrastructure that lets AI systems search, extract, monitor and reason over information on the web. | $100M, Series B (April 29, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| RadixArk | RadixArk, founded by the creators of the SGLang inference engine, builds open AI infrastructure for inference and reinforcement learning, including managed infrastructure for teams. | $100 million, Seed (May 5, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Runpod | Runpod is an AI developer cloud where developers build, train, fine-tune, deploy and scale AI workloads. | $100 million, Series A (June 24, 2026) | Cited in 62 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Braintrust | Braintrust is an observability and evals platform for AI agents that traces production behavior and lets teams run experiments against datasets before shipping. | $80M, Series B (February 17, 2026) | Cited in 19 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Firecrawl | Firecrawl is a web data API that searches, scrapes and interacts with websites, turning them into clean Markdown or structured data for AI agents. | $75 million, Series B (September 22, 2026) | Cited in 46 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Arcade | Arcade is an actions runtime that sits between enterprise AI agents and business systems to authorize, execute and govern every agent action. | $60M, Series A (June 15, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Patronus AI | Patronus AI trains Digital World Models that simulate agent actions in digital workflows to generate simulations frontier models can train and be evaluated on. | $50M, Series B (June 25, 2026) | Cited in 4 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Qdrant | Qdrant is a vector search engine for building high-performance AI retrieval at any scale and under any deployment model. | $50M, Series B (March 12, 2026) | Cited in 13 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Parasail | Parasail is an inference cloud that serves 40+ open and frontier models through one OpenAI-compatible API and tunes deployments for speed, quality and cost. | $32 million, Series A (April 15, 2026) | Cited in 9 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Fiddler AI | Fiddler is an enterprise AI observability and security platform positioned as a control plane for monitoring, evaluating and governing AI agents. | $30M, Series C (January 27, 2026) | Cited in 7 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Daytona | Daytona provides secure, elastic sandbox infrastructure for running AI-generated code, with fast environment creation and stateful operation. | $24M, Series A (February 5, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| Kernel | Kernel gives web agents cloud browser infrastructure, with isolated Chromium sessions controlled via API or SDK plus live view, replays and telemetry. | $22M, Seed and Series A (combined) (October 9, 2025) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
| HUD | HUD is a platform for building reinforcement-learning environments that encode domain expertise to train and evaluate models and produce post-training data. | $16M, Series A (June 30, 2026) | Cited in 0 of 16,925 Index answers, May 10, 2026 to September 26, 2026 |
What counts as ai infrastructure
A company joins this map when its own site describes ai infrastructure as its main product and an independent source confirms it, and it publicly announced a priced funding round in the last 12 months. The table shows each company's most recent announced financing, which can be a later instrument such as convertible notes; the qualifying round is in the data file. Out of scope: companies whose product is an end-user AI application, and companies whose most recent announced round is more than 12 months old. The Machine Relations Index column counts the answers in the Machine Relations Index that cited the company's website; the Index asks a fixed panel of buyer questions about software and services, so it measures how often AI engines already treat the company as a source. Definitions are versioned; this is version 1. Corrections need a public source: see Contact.
Questions this map tracks
- Which companies provide AI infrastructure?
- What are the fastest-growing AI infrastructure startups?
- Which AI infrastructure startups have raised funding recently?
- What are the best GPU cloud providers for AI training?
- What is the best inference platform for deploying open-source models?
- Which companies provide web data for AI agents?
- What are the best LLM evaluation and observability tools?
- What is the best sandbox or browser infrastructure for AI agents?
Changes
- September 27, 2026: Map started with 30 verified companies.