Just a few years ago, Cast AI was a growing startup trying to carve out a space in the crowded cloud automation world.
Today, the Miami-based startup is closing a $108 million Series C round, led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with Bernard Arnault’s family office, Aglaé Ventures, also joining the round.
But what’s more interesting than the money is the story behind it: a company that saw the future of cloud performance automation before anyone else, only to now find itself right where the market needs it most.
In an interview with Refresh Miami, Cast AI President Laurent Gil explained that 2024 marked a major inflection point. Large enterprises like BMW, FICO, and a major global airline started flocking to Cast’s platform – not because Cast changed, but because the needs of the market shifted in their direction.
“We went upmarket not because we forced it,” said Gil, who co-founded Cast AI with Yuri Frayman and Leon Kuperman. “The market went that way. What we solve happened to be extremely important for large enterprises, and it took us by storm.”
At the same time, another trend exploded: the use of GPUs to power AI workloads. Cast found itself at the heart of this shift, building what Gil described as an “AI agent obsessed with efficiency.” In real time, Cast’s platform allocates exactly the right cloud resources (CPUs, GPUs, memory) without overprovisioning. The result is better performance and major cost savings.
“Think about it,” Gil asserted. “You have a team of five DevOps engineers who look at cloud efficiency maybe once or twice a month. Now imagine having 200 more team members, who never sleep, never take vacations, and optimize your systems every second. That’s what our agent does.”
It’s not theoretical, either. In one internal test, Cast’s AI agent found that companies could spend three to ten times less on GPU workloads simply by moving them to the right locations. Gil said the difference between a 10x cost and a 1x cost is the difference between an experiment and a production system.
Investors took notice. “They came to us,” Gil said. “We weren’t planning to raise that much, but when you have partners who really share your vision, you say yes.”
The new capital will help Cast accelerate its growth – especially in Asia, where they plan to expand into Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. It will also allow them to expand the platform’s capabilities beyond compute resources to areas like data storage efficiency.
Meanwhile, Cast is growing fast at home. The team doubled from about 100 people to nearly 300 globally over the past year, and Gil expects the company to reach between 400 and 500 employees in the next 12 months. Importantly, Cast’s leadership team has fully settled in Miami, a sign, Gil said, that the city’s tech ecosystem has matured.
“It feels like we’ve grown up,” he said. “It’s not hype anymore. We found incredible senior executives in Miami: talent that would normally have been based in San Francisco or New York.”
The city’s evolution mirrored Cast’s own. Early on, Gil recalled struggling to find seasoned talent locally. Now, with SoftBank and West Coast investors in their corner, and Fortune 500 clients on their platform, Cast and Miami are stepping into a new phase together.
As for the broader vision? Gil believes that cloud automation will soon reach a point where performance and cost are no longer at odds.
“You’ll get more performance because we supply exactly what you need; not too much, not too little,” he said. “It’s the beginning of a revolution.”
Pictured above: Cast AI co-founders (left to right) Laurent Gil, President, Leon Kuperman, CTO, and Yuri Frayman, CEO.
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