Crane Leads $5.3M Seed for AI Compute Forecaster Expanse
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Expanse has raised a $5.3 million Seed round, or €4.5 million, to expand its engineering team, speed up product development, and reach more of the industry. Crane Venture Partners led the round, with PXN Ventures, AIP Seed, and angel investors including former DeepMind researchers taking part.
The San Francisco company, which also operates in the UK, was founded in 2025. Its software predicts what an AI workload will need before the job runs, which helps organizations cut over-allocation, avoid failed jobs, and get more out of GPU infrastructure they already own.
The founding team came out of the University of Edinburgh, four graduate engineers who had built and operated large-scale compute across quantitative finance and national supercomputing facilities. At the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, co-founder and CEO Ismaeel Bashir developed a multimodal HPC resource prediction system for forecasting requirements across HPC workloads. He and co-founders Nikodem Bieniek, Eren Mendi, and Yafet Melake noticed that even the most sophisticated compute environments still allocate resources by manual estimation.
The distinction Expanse draws is timing. Traditional monitoring and observability platforms explain what happened once a workload has finished. Expanse works before execution starts. Installed directly into a customer’s cloud or on-premises infrastructure, its models analyze workloads without code or telemetry leaving that environment, which preserves data sovereignty while optimizing performance.
In one production deployment, the platform identified close to $8 million of idle compute capacity in a single month. The California company has customers running both cloud and on-premises fleets.
Crane co-founder and partner Scott Sage frames the category as certainty: knowing what every workload needs before it runs lets customers recover existing capacity, cut waste, and extend the life of expensive infrastructure. Andy Barrow, managing director of PXN Ventures, points to optimization as one of the central challenges engineers face as AI adoption spreads, since better use of compute lowers running costs and improves scalability.
The round lands a day after Crane Venture Partners announced €419 million across four new investment vehicles.
Expanse will take its platform to organizations across AI infrastructure, quantitative finance, life sciences, research, and high performance computing.
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