Lightning AI, originally founded as Grid.ai in 2019 by William Falcon and Luis Capelo, is a pioneering platform designed to streamline the development, training, and deployment of AI models and applications. The company emerged from Falcon's work on PyTorch Lightning, an open-source framework initiated during his time at Columbia University and further developed at NYU and Facebook AI Research.

In 2022, Grid.ai rebranded to Lightning AI to reflect its expanded focus on unifying the AI development lifecycle. The platform has since evolved into a comprehensive ecosystem, offering tools like Lightning Studio and Lightning Apps to facilitate end-to-end AI workflows.

Lightning AI has garnered significant traction, with over 230,000 developers and 3,200 organizations utilizing its tools, including notable entities like NVIDIA and Stability AI. The company has raised a total of $103 million in funding from prominent investors such as Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Cisco Investments, J.P. Morgan, and NVIDIA.