Databricks cofounder Ion Stoica can explain what his latest startup does to a kindergartner on the fly.
The basis for his new company SkyPilot, which he cofounded with Zongheng Yang, is this: companies need computers to run, different providers sell those computers, switching between them is painful and expensive, so SkyPilot makes it easy to use any of them, meaning “more compute, better compute, cheaper compute.”
Today, Stoica and Yang are publicly launching SkyPilot, backed by $20 million seed funding, Fortune learned exclusively. Lux Capital led the round with Coatue and Amplify Partners also writing checks.
Stoica traces the problem SkyPilot is targeting back to Databricks. Expanding Databricks from one cloud to two took a year of engineering pain, he told me. AI made that pain universal. Every lab now calls five or ten cloud providers on day one just to scrape together enough GPUs, then needs a way to actually use them together.
CEO Zongheng Yang, who interned at Databricks when it was roughly ten people, says the bigger opportunity isn’t hunting cheap compute, it’s squeezing more out of GPUs companies already own. “If you spend like $100 million per year on GPUs, SkyPilot frequently helps our customers squeeze out more than 10% of utilization,” he told me, which is $10 million in savings from efficiency alone.
