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Mount Thor raises $45 million to build Mac data centers for AI agents
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Mount Thor, a Bay Area startup building cloud infrastructure on Apple silicon, announced today that it has raised $45 million across Seed and Series A rounds. The pitch to its investors was simple: AI agents are incredible on Apple silicon, and nobody is renting them at data-center scale.
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CRV and Conviction co-led the Series A. Chad Byers and Offline Ventures co-led the Seed. CSC Leasing, Enea Capital, Long Journey Ventures, and Upper90 participated, along with angel investors from OpenAI, Meta, Cognition, Together AI, and Vercel. The company also raised separate non-dilutive financing for new hardware as well.
Mount Thor runs macOS on Apple silicon as elastic compute instances, just as a cloud provider rents Linux VMs. Customers get on-demand fleets of Macs for work that only happens on macOS: training computer-use models in reinforcement learning environments, running secure macOS sandboxes for agents, long-running instances that let an agent work across a user’s devices under one Apple ID, and build and test farms for Apple software.
There are two ways to use its solution. With managed compute, customers pick a machine class and image, and get either a full bare-metal Mac or an isolated macOS VM with administrator access, provisioned through a web portal, a command-line tool, Kubernetes, or the API, and billed per Mac on a 24-hour basis. With customer-managed compute, an organization runs its own Macs at a Mount Thor site using its own MDM, while Mount Thor operates the facility and provides inventory by serial number, problem reporting, and event notifications.
The argument is that agents are becoming macOS users, and the demand for Apple’s platform now scales with the number of agents rather than the number of people.
“Making Apple’s operating system and silicon available at datacenter-scale is a massive untapped opportunity in AI infrastructure,” said Peter Voell, Founder and CEO of Mount Thor. “Decades of investment in accessibility and human-computer interaction make macOS the best place for agents to work and for humans to hold them accountable. And with chips like the M5 Ultra, Apple silicon is becoming a high performance, more power- and cost- efficient platform for production inference.”
The other half of its pitch is inference. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio shipped in August with up to 512GB of unified memory, which puts large open-weight models within reach of a single machine at a fraction of the power draw of a traditional GPU-based server. Mount Thor says a focus of the new funding is building what it calls the best inference lab for open-source models on Apple silicon.
“Mount Thor sits at the intersection of two important shifts: the rapidly expanding capabilities of autonomous agents and the increasing demand for compute that can support both local and cloud workloads,” said Brittany Walker, General Partner at CRV. “We’re thrilled to back Peter and the team as they make it easier to use Apple’s platforms at scale for agentic AI.”