While cloud giants like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate the infrastructure market. One startup believes the AI world is heading in a different direction — and it’s betting big on that vision. Parasail, an AI infrastructure startup, officially launched this week with a mission to decentralize access to powerful GPU resources. Rather than competing as another hyperscaler, Parasail is offering a more horizontal, flexible alternative that taps into dozens of GPU providers to help companies build and scale AI models more affordably.
The idea behind Parasail is simple: AI compute shouldn’t be monopolized. “There are three cloud vendors who run the internet,” said Tim Harris, co-founder of Parasail and CEO of Swift Navigation. “But that’s not how AI infrastructure is being rebuilt. It’s much more fragmented, fluid, and fungible — and that’s what we’re enabling.”
Parasail connects customers with on-demand access to high-end GPUs — including Nvidia’s H100, H200, A100, and 4090s. At a fraction of the price charged by hyperscalers, according to the company. Behind the scenes is a layer of proprietary tech that links all of these GPUs together from diverse sources, making it easier for enterprises to find and run the compute they need.
Co-founder and CEO Mike Henry, formerly chief product officer at Groq, said the idea stemmed from watching AI infrastructure evolve rapidly. As the pace of AI hardware innovation accelerated, many companies were struggling just to keep up. “We realized we needed to make this simple,” Henry said. “Many customers can’t even keep up with the model releases — let alone infrastructure management.”
The startup began building in early 2024, after Harris and Henry assembled an engineering team in 2023. Since then, Parasail has already signed on dozens of clients, including Elicit, Weights & Biases, and Rasa. On Wednesday, the company formally launched its platform and announced a $10 million seed round with support from Basis Set Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Buckley Ventures, and Black Opal Ventures.
Parasail’s pitch is not just about cost — it’s about accessibility and scalability. The platform makes it easy to run AI workloads without requiring companies to manage or deploy data centers themselves. “We can provide access to GPUs, optimize workloads, and handle scaling — all with a click,” Harris said.
While there’s no shortage of GPU vendors in the AI space, from legacy hyperscalers to newer players like Together AI and Lepton AI, Parasail believes its horizontal integration strategy gives it a long-term advantage. Rather than owning all the hardware, Parasail acts as a layer that unifies and simplifies access across multiple providers.
Still, the market isn’t without risk. Despite current demand, some signs — like Microsoft canceling select data center contracts — suggest future infrastructure needs might not grow as aggressively as once expected. But Harris remains confident.
“We see literally no end to demand,” he said. “The challenge is that customers are still figuring out how to scale AI. Access to GPUs is still one of the biggest bottlenecks — and we’re solving that.”
As AI becomes more foundational to products and services, startups like Parasail may hold the key to making powerful infrastructure more accessible, affordable, and scalable for the next wave of innovation.
