The next Lithuanian Unicorn? Cast AI grabs $108M at $850M valuation.

Earlier this week, Cast AI, a cloud optimisation powerhouse with deep Lithuanian roots, secured $108 million in Series C funding, propelling its valuation to $850 million. This latest round, led by G2 Venture Partners andSoftBank Vision Fund 2, brings Cast AI within reach of the coveted $1 billion mark and solidifies its position among Lithuania’s most promising tech companies. Notable backers includeAglaé Ventures(led by LVMH’s Bernard Arnault),Hedosophia,Cota Capital,Vintage Investment Partners,Creandum,Uncorrelated Ventures, and Sophia Vintage Investment.
This funding brings Cast AI’s total capital raised to over $180 million. The company will use the new funds to enhance its Application Performance Automation (APA) platform, which automates and optimises cloud infrastructure for enterprises. The company plans to utilise this capital to improve its platform capabilities and accelerate international growth, having recently established offices in India and Singapore. This expansion strategy reflects Cast AI’s ambition to become a global leader in cloud optimisation.
CEOYuri Fraymandescribed this funding round as “fuel for our continued expansion of a category we created.” CTOLeon Kupermanemphasised how enterprise demands are shifting from static dashboards to intelligent automation that continuously improves performance and cost efficiency.
While officially headquartered in Miami, Cast AI’s core operations are based in Vilnius, where most of its engineering and product teams are located. This reflects a broader trend: Lithuania’s startup ecosystem is becoming increasingly global, producing unicorns such as Flo Health, Revolut, and Vinted — all with significant operations or origins in the country.
Cast AI, founded in 2019 in Miami, Florida, has quickly established itself as a leader in Kubernetes automation and cloud cost optimisation. Co-founders Yuri Frayman (CEO) and Leon Kuperman (CTO) identified a critical problem in cloud computing: massive resource waste and escalating costs.
Since its inception, Cast AI has grown to roughly 200 employees globally, attracting significant attention from investors and enterprise customers. The company’s mission is clear and ambitious: to provide a fully automated Kubernetes experience that substantially reduces cloud expenses while enhancing performance.
Cast AI’s timing makes its story particularly compelling, emerging just as businesses worldwide accelerated their cloud adoption, only to face the challenge of controlling costs. This focus on solving a growing pain point in the technology industry forms the foundation of Cast AI’s appeal.
At the heart of Cast AI’s offerings is its innovation, “Application Performance Automation” (APA), a category it pioneered. Unlike traditional cloud management tools that only monitor and suggest changes, Cast AI’s platform actively implements improvements through automation.
Using advanced machine learning algorithms, the technology analyses Kubernetes clusters in real-time, automatically adjusting resource allocation. Published benchmarks show that cloud environments typically suffer from poor resource utilisation — only 10% of CPUs and 23% of memory are generally in use. Cast AI’s platform directly addresses this inefficiency.
One of their latest innovations, introduced in late 2024, is the AI Enabler tool, designed to optimise large language model deployments. This feature intelligently routes queries to the most effective models, helping organisations reduce the high costs of GPU-intensive AI tasks. The company notes this capability particularly appeals to Fortune 500 firms managing expensive AI deployments.
Cast AI’s success is evident in its customer testimonials. The company doubled its client base from 2023 to 2024, now serving over 2,100 organisations worldwide, including major firms like Akamai, BMW, FICO, and HuggingFace.
Akamai’s case studystands out, showing cloud cost reductions of 40-70% after adopting Cast AI. Dekel Shavit, Senior Director of Engineering at Akamai, stated, “For our use case, Cast was not two times better or five times better. It was immeasurably better.” He noted that beyond cost savings, Cast AI significantly improved engineer productivity by automating previously manual tasks.
Another notableexample is OpenX, a leading ad exchange company managing over 200,000 CPUs across various regions. Their Principal Cloud Architect, Ivan Gusev, recommends Cast AI for “any company” struggling with compute resource costs, praising its ability to streamline complex cloud management operations.
Cast AI’s platform features several unique capabilities that distinguish it from cloud management competitors. The “Spot Fallback” featureenablesbusinesses to utilise affordable spot instances, which can be up to 90% cheaper, even during peak demand periods, such as holiday shopping seasons. If spot instances become unavailable, the system seamlessly switches to on-demand instances, ensuring continuous service without requiring manual intervention until the spot capacity is restored.
Unlike solutions that recommend fixed instance types, Cast AI’s automation evaluates all available options that are suitable for a workload’s specific needs. In one case, the platform suggested a high-performance INF1 instance, typically used for ML inference, because it was temporarily cheaper as a spot instance than standard alternatives—a cost-saving opportunity human operators might miss.
The platform’s bin packing features improve resource efficiency by intelligently organising workloads, while its autoscaling adjusts resources in real-time based on current demand. Cast AI also provides comprehensive cost analytics that offer insight into cloud spending across categories.
Most importantly, these features are compatible with multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, providing businesses with flexibility and preventing vendor lock-in.
Lithuania’s startup scene has produced several unicorns, with more emerging thanks to its deep talent pool and thriving innovation ecosystem. According to the latestBaltic Deep Tech report, unicorns associated with Lithuania are defined not just by their valuation but also by their operational and developmental ties to the country — a criterion that Cast AI meets with its Vilnius-based engineering hub and significant contributions to the local tech economy.
As cloud costs rise globally, particularly with the growth of AI and large-scale data processing, Cast AI’s value proposition becomes increasingly stronger. With its latest funding, world-class team, and cutting-edge cloud automation platform, Cast AI isn’t just a unicorn contender; it’s a symbol of Lithuania’s transformation into a global tech powerhouse.