U.K.-based graphics processing unit cloud company NexGen Cloud Ltd. said today it has closed on a $45 million Series A round of funding to fuel its ambition of becoming the artificial intelligence infrastructure platform of choice for European companies.

Today’s round was led by a number of family trusts and high-net-worth individuals, but the company chose not to name any of them in its announcement.

Founded in 2020, NextGen Cloud began life as a provider of cloud-based infrastructure for blockchain applications, only to pivot to the AI industry and establish a GPU-as-a-Service cloud after failing to get much traction. It describes itself as an “AI factory,” providing access to the GPUs and other infrastructure needed to run AI applications.

Notably, NexGen Cloud doesn’t own its own data centers. Rather, it has long-term agreements to access GPUs from existing hyperscalers and then offers this to customers that need more flexible access to run their AI training and inference applications. In this way, it allows its customers to secure time on GPUs on an on-demand basis.

The startup provides access through its Hyperstack platform, which offers a comprehensive range of infrastructure services besides the basic GPUs. It also offers consulting services to help companies plan their AI projects.

In an interview with Forbes, NexGen Cloud’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Youlian Tzanev said the company’s model is attractive because customers want a solution that’s simple and easy to use. “As their AI projects grow, they need something they can scale up quickly,” he added.

The startup’s strategy has paid off, with its revenue growing from just $3 million in 2023 to more than $70 million by the end of 2024. All told, it claims its AI cloud operations revenue grew 380% in the last year. At present, it has more than 10,000 customers on its books, including organizations such as Red Hat Inc., Ingenix.AI Ltd. and ArchiLabs Inc.

“We deliver cloud in the way it’s meant to be delivered,” Tzanev said.

NexGen cloud says it’s operating in a market that’s growing extremely rapidly. A report by SNS Insider forecasts the GPU-as-a-Service segment to grow from $3.3 billion globally to more than $34 billion by the end of 2032.

Although NexGen does face a lot of competition in the GPU cloud industry from rivals, including Vultr Inc., Akamai Technologies Inc. and Lambda Labs Inc., it believes it has a significant advantage in being based in Europe, where companies AI efforts are subject to heavy regulations regarding data privacy and management. The company is trying to position itself as a “sovereign AI infrastructure provider” that allows European businesses to run their AI workloads on dedicated virtual machines in local data centers, giving them more control over data security and privacy.

Looking forward, NexGen Cloud said it wants to focus on establishing more partnerships that can help it to enhance access to, and the delivery of, AI compute services. It added that it plans to spend around half of the money from today’s round on expanding its GPU capacity, with the remainder set aside for accelerating its platform development. That includes the creation of a new Fine Tuning-as-a-Service offering. It also plans to expand its team and use some of the money on future acquisitions.

According to Tzanev, the cloud infrastructure market is on the verge of dramatic change. “It has been something of a monopolistic market, dominated by a handful of giant U.S. technology companies,” he said. “But now, people are exploring other options.”

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