Thunder Compute (legal entity: Thunder GPU, Inc.) is a Y Combinator-backed cloud GPU platform founded in 2024 that delivers on-demand GPU instances at prices up to 80% lower than major cloud providers
Thunder Compute (legal entity: Thunder GPU, Inc.) is a Y Combinator-backed cloud GPU platform founded in 2024 that delivers on-demand GPU instances at prices up to 80% lower than major cloud providers like AWS and GCP. The company's core innovation is a proprietary GPU virtualization layer that attaches GPUs over TCP, decoupling GPU scheduling from server scheduling and maximizing hardware utilization to 60–90%. Its developer-first philosophy includes one-click VS Code integration, persistent storage, hardware snapshots, and hot-swappable GPU types.
Total raised
$6.5M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
Carl Peterson
Carl Peterson is the CEO and co-founder of Thunder Compute. He met co-founder Brian Model as a freshman at Georgia Tech and the two maintained a close friendship for over six years before launching the company. His founding insight was that GPU infrastructure was needlessly expensive and complex, and the solution was software-first virtualization rather than more hardware. Previously worked as an Associate Consultant at Bain & Company in Atlanta.
LinkedInJack Decker
Jack Decker served as Founding Engineer at Thunder Compute from October 2024 to November 2024. He has since moved to a Software Engineer role at Porter (YC S20). Previously worked in R&D at Cisco.
LinkedInBrian Model
Brian Model is the CTO and co-founder of Thunder Compute. His founding insight came from experience in a Systems for AI lab at Georgia Tech, where researchers were forced to reserve GPUs weeks in advance using Google Sheets. At Citadel Securities, he built low-latency options trading systems, giving him deep systems engineering expertise now applied to GPU orchestration. Describes himself as a 'Fan of C++' on X.
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