TA Ventures’ Portfolio Reaches 17 Unicorns as Cast AI Raises $108M
Ukrainian venture capital firm TA Ventures now counts 17 unicorns in its portfolio. The milestone follows a $108 million investment round that valued Cast AI, a startup co-founded by Odesa native Yuri Fryman, at over $1 billion, according to TA Ventures partner Yurii Romaniuk.
«TA Ventures backed CAST in early 2020, long before AI infrastructure became a strategic imperative. Today, Cast AI’s platform automatically optimizes Kubernetes and cloud workloads, slashes waste, and now introduces a unified GPU marketplace that makes compute truly portable across clouds,» Romaniuk said.
Funding details
- The Series C round was led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Aglaé Ventures — the venture capital firm of Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of LVMH — as well as existing investors Hedosophia, Cota Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Creandum, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
- TA Ventures first invested in CAST.AI during a $7.7 million seed round, alongside DNX, Florida Funders, and angel investors. At the time, the company had just 25 employees. Today, CAST.AI is estimated to employ between 200 and 300 people.
- The company has scaled rapidly since its early days. According to CAST.AI, its customer base doubled between 2023 and 2024, reaching 2,000 companies, including Akamai, BMW, FICO, HuggingFace, NielsenIQ, and Swisscom.
- CAST.AI has also expanded its global footprint, opening offices in India and Singapore, in addition to existing locations in Vilnius, Tel Aviv, Miami, Dallas, New York, and London.
About CAST.AI and Yuri Fryman
- CAST.AI is a technology company focused on AI-driven optimization of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes environments. Its platform helps companies reduce cloud costs by automatically selecting the most efficient computing resources, including CPU, GPU, and memory, for their applications.
- The startup was founded by Yuri Fryman, Leon Cooperman, and Laurent Gilles. Fryman has Ukrainian roots and strong ties to Ukraine. He was born and raised in Odesa, where he studied until the seventh grade before emigrating with his family — first to Israel, and later to the United States in 1974. Fryman has also been active as an investor in the Ukrainian tech ecosystem. He was an early investor in Viewdle, a Ukrainian startup focused on facial recognition for mobile devices, which was acquired by Google in 2012. Fryman currently lives in Miami.
- According to his LinkedIn profile, Fryman has founded six successful businesses and generated more than $750 million in proceeds from exits.
TA Ventures’ Portfolio Reaches 17 Unicorns as Cast AI Raises $108M
Ukrainian venture capital firm TA Ventures now counts 17 unicorns in its portfolio. The milestone follows a $108 million investment round that valued Cast AI, a startup co-founded by Odesa native Yuri Fryman, at over $1 billion, according to TA Ventures partner Yurii Romaniuk.
«TA Ventures backed CAST in early 2020, long before AI infrastructure became a strategic imperative. Today, Cast AI’s platform automatically optimizes Kubernetes and cloud workloads, slashes waste, and now introduces a unified GPU marketplace that makes compute truly portable across clouds,» Romaniuk said.
Funding details
- The Series C round was led by G2 Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Aglaé Ventures — the venture capital firm of Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of LVMH — as well as existing investors Hedosophia, Cota Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Creandum, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
- TA Ventures first invested in CAST.AI during a $7.7 million seed round, alongside DNX, Florida Funders, and angel investors. At the time, the company had just 25 employees. Today, CAST.AI is estimated to employ between 200 and 300 people.
- The company has scaled rapidly since its early days. According to CAST.AI, its customer base doubled between 2023 and 2024, reaching 2,000 companies, including Akamai, BMW, FICO, HuggingFace, NielsenIQ, and Swisscom.
- CAST.AI has also expanded its global footprint, opening offices in India and Singapore, in addition to existing locations in Vilnius, Tel Aviv, Miami, Dallas, New York, and London.
About CAST.AI and Yuri Fryman
- CAST.AI is a technology company focused on AI-driven optimization of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes environments. Its platform helps companies reduce cloud costs by automatically selecting the most efficient computing resources, including CPU, GPU, and memory, for their applications.
- The startup was founded by Yuri Fryman, Leon Cooperman, and Laurent Gilles. Fryman has Ukrainian roots and strong ties to Ukraine. He was born and raised in Odesa, where he studied until the seventh grade before emigrating with his family — first to Israel, and later to the United States in 1974. Fryman has also been active as an investor in the Ukrainian tech ecosystem. He was an early investor in Viewdle, a Ukrainian startup focused on facial recognition for mobile devices, which was acquired by Google in 2012. Fryman currently lives in Miami.
- According to his LinkedIn profile, Fryman has founded six successful businesses and generated more than $750 million in proceeds from exits.
