General Compute raises $100 million Series A for inference infrastructure

General Compute has raised a $100 million Series A led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, after securing a deal with a large customer worth $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The round brought the startup’s post-money valuation to $800 million, up from $60 million after its May seed round. The company also struck a $400 million deal to purchase chips from SambaNova and added Positron and Cerebras to its supplier roster.

The startup is betting on specialized inference chips rather than GPUs, while renting space in other companies’ data centers or converting former bitcoin-mining sites. CEO Finn Puklowski expects to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027 and says the company may have access to 200 megawatts of power. General Compute supplies bare-metal servers to cloud companies offering high-speed inference services to developers.