Twitch and Oculus Founders Back Juice Labs to Solve GPU Scarcity With Software

Juice Labs, a startup building a drop-in software solution to boost GPU availability and utilization for graphics and computing workloads, is announcing that it has raised $1.75M in seed funding.

Founded in 2020, the company is led by CEO Steve Golik and CTO Dean Beeler. Golik was an early executive at GetFeedback and Turnitin, helping lead both to acquisitions. Beeler comes from Facebook/Oculus, where he invented the now-standard graphics technologies Async Spacewarp (ASW) and VR Direct Mode.

“GPUs and other emerging accelerators are a precious resource that companies are increasingly relying on to fuel innovation and build value, in a wide variety of spaces from machine learning to manufacturing to game development,” Golik said. “But Moore’s law is dead – supply won’t be able to keep up with demand, and despite this crunch, there’s tremendous inefficiency in how GPU is being used.”

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Most business leaders are unaware that the GPUs they’re buying or renting are running at only 10-15% capacity because of technical constraints.

“Our drop-in-anywhere software solution gives companies near-100% utilization from the GPUs they already use, dropping costs dramatically and buying time for global capacity to catch up with the massive value creation we all expect from accelerated computing,” he added.

Beeler compared the startup to VMware, suggesting it will transform the usage of GPU like virtual machines did for CPU computing. “This is all about leverage,” he said. “A company’s scarcest and most precious hardware assets shouldn’t be squandered by these terribly inefficient configurations.”

Juice is currently working with companies in data annotation, manufacturing, and game development to allow multiple client machines (which would normally each lock up an entire GPU) to share the same GPU remotely, layering workloads together to drive up utilization.

As Juice Labs grows, Golik said, they’re expanding to cover all possible use cases for accelerators. “Our core tech isn’t fundamentally tied to any device, operating system, API, chip vendor, or deployment environment. Especially as demand for edge acceleration rises, we’re seeing some very exciting applications for efficient, shareable GPU starting to emerge.”

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He added, “Our vision is to make accelerated computing as accessible, omnipresent, effortless, and affordable as electricity.”

The funding was led by Outsiders Fund, with participation from Krafton Ventures, Twitch founder Kevin Lin, and Oculus founders Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell.

“Computing has come to rely on the flexibility of virtual machines for operating systems and network-attached storage for data, but incorporating GPUs into otherwise-dynamic modern computing infrastructure is still awkward and limited,” said Outsiders Fund partner and Datto founder Austin McChord in a statement. “There is no bigger scarcity in computing right now than GPU cycles, and the team at Juice Labs has figured out how to broadly optimize access to these cycles.”

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