Applied Compute raises $350M at $3.25B valuation led by Elad Gil with Nvidia
Applied Compute, an AI cloud startup, said it raised $350 million at a $3.25 billion valuation. The company announced the round on Monday, November 2. Angel investor Elad Gil led it, with Nvidia, Shopify Ventures and HubSpot Ventures participating alongside more than a dozen other investors, according to SiliconANGLE, which first covered the deal. Other participants named in later coverage include Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital and Blackstone. AI Weekly summarized the round on November 4, crediting SiliconANGLE for the first report.
The company says its annualized revenue run rate has passed $100 million, up from zero about 18 months ago. These figures are company-reported and unaudited, and a run rate annualizes a recent stretch of sales rather than a full year. Microsoft, Shopify and DoorDash are named as customers. Applied Compute also says 40% of its customers use the platform for both custom model training and production inference, and that its inference service handles 1 trillion tokens a day. Proceeds are earmarked for expanding market presence and buying more infrastructure.
The platform uses asynchronous reinforcement learning, which runs data generation and weight updates at the same time, according to SiliconANGLE. Co-founders Rhythm Garg, Yash Patil and Linden Li previously worked at OpenAI. FourWeekMBA reports an earlier $80 million round in April 2026 at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins.
Why it matters
For founders, the round shows that reported growth and a strategic chip partner can support a large private raise. The price works out to roughly 32 times the reported run rate, a multiple that rests on figures the company has not audited. Founders should expect investors to ask for verifiable revenue, retention and margin data, because a fast climb from zero to $100 million still leaves open how durable the usage is.
For operators and investors, the account points to demand for tools that let companies own and tune their models instead of relying only on general-purpose APIs. Participation from Nvidia, Shopify Ventures and HubSpot Ventures suggests that chip suppliers and software buyers want exposure to infrastructure vendors. Anyone selling into this market should track whether the reported share of customers using both training and inference holds up in later disclosures.
Key points
- 1Applied Compute raised $350 million at a $3.25 billion valuation, led by angel investor Elad Gil.
- 2The company says annualized revenue run rate passed $100 million about 18 months after its founding.
- 3Nvidia, Shopify Ventures and HubSpot Ventures participated, along with more than a dozen other investors.
- 4The company says 40% of its customers use the platform for both custom model training and production inference.
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