- Seattle-based Algorithmia recently raised $25 million in funding led by Norwest Venture Partners
- Algorithmia’s AI Layer platform is used by government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and more than 900K engineers and data scientists
Algorithmia is a Seattle-based company that has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) Layer platform that automates DevOps for machine learning (ML) applications.
The company targets enterprises and government agencies that are ready to deploy ML at scale. For example, its AI layer is already being used by the United Nations, multiple US intelligence agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and more than 900,000 engineers and data scientists.
Recently, Algorithmia announced it raised $25 million in funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. Madrona, Gradient Ventures, Work-Bench, Osage University Partners and Rakuten Ventures also participated in this round of funding.
“Machine Learning requires a very different infrastructure and lifecycle than traditional software,” said Algorithmia CEO Diego Oppenheimer. “This investment allows us to continue to be laser-focused empowering them to deploy and iterate their models at full speed.”
In conjunction with this round of funding, Norwest partner Rama Sekhar is joining Algorithmia’s board of directors. With this round of funding, Algorithmia is going to expand its AI automation platform. Plus the company is going to use the new capital for product development, engineering talent, sales, marketing, and international expansion.
“Productionizing machine learning models manually was a serious challenge before we found Algorithmia. The AI Layer gave us the tech stack to smoothly deploy and manage our machine learning lifecycle and their team goes above and beyond to ensure that our efforts are successful,” added Michael Fischer — the Chief of Innovation at MS&AD (a Toyota affiliated company).
Even though there is tremendous optimism around AI, adoption is being slowed due to manual IT infrastructure management tasks. Last year, Algorithmia conducted a survey with 500 data scientists that found that 75% of their time is spent deploying, connecting, scaling and managing ML models manually.
An AI Layer solves this problem by automating the ML DevOps lifecycle, which allows data scientists and ML teams to collaborate and manage their portfolios of models. Data scientists are able to gain efficiency and focus on building models rather than managing infrastructure.
“AI is creating a fundamental shift in technology that is as big, if not bigger than mobile and cloud,” explained Sekhar. “Every Fortune 500 CIO has an AI initiative but they are bogged down by the difficulty of managing and deploying ML models. Algorithmia is the clear leader in building the tools to manage the complete machine learning lifecycle and helping customers unlock value from their R&D investments. We’re thrilled to lead this investment and back the incredible team at Algorithmia.”
