The startup founded by Databricks cofounder Ion Stoica and CEO Zongheng Yang aims to help companies use GPUs across multiple cloud providers more efficiently.
SkyPilot has publicly launched with $20 million in seed funding, with Lux Capital leading the round and Coatue and Amplify Partners also participating. The company, cofounded by Databricks cofounder Ion Stoica and Zongheng Yang, is building software to help companies run workloads across multiple cloud providers, addressing the cost and operational complexity of stitching together computing capacity from different vendors. Stoica said the problem became clear during Databricks’ expansion across clouds, which he described as a year of engineering pain, and argued that the AI boom has made that challenge widespread as companies contact five or ten cloud providers to secure enough GPUs. Yang said the larger opportunity is not only finding cheaper compute but improving the use of existing GPU fleets. He said customers spending about $100 million a year on GPUs can often gain more than 10% in utilization through SkyPilot, translating to roughly $10 million in efficiency savings. The company traces its roots to UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, where Stoica and Yang developed the framework as an open-source project. The core research paper was presented at the NSDI 2023 conference, and the system is designed to let companies run AI workloads across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and specialized providers as a unified pool of compute, including through automatic failover and optimization for spot instances. By mid-2026, the project had announced a managed control plane integration with Nebius AI Cloud and expanded partnerships with providers including Runpod and AMD hardware. SkyPilot is entering a market where GPU orchestration (software that coordinates how graphics processors are allocated and used) is drawing broader attention. Nvidia bought Run:ai for roughly $700 million in 2024 and later open-sourced it, while the wider AI orchestration market is projected to expand from around $14 billion in 2026 to more than $60 billion by 2034. SkyPilot’s backers say its neutrality is a differentiator because it is not tied to a single cloud or hardware vendor, though it faces cloud providers that have strong incentives to keep customers inside their own ecosystems.