- Anyscale, a company that simplifies the creation of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based applications, announced it raised $20.6 million
Anyscale — a company that simplifies the creation of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based applications founded by Robert Nishihara, Ion Stoica, and Philipp Moritz — announced it has raised $20.6 million in its first round of funding.
This round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from NEA, Intel Capital, Ant Financial, Amplify Partners, 11.2 Capital, and The House Fund.
Anyscale’s technology is based on the Ray open-source framework and it was developed in a lab that Stoica co-directs called Berkeley’s RISELab. And Anyscale is using the open-source framework to build and manage distributed application environments.
Stoica is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley who is known for building some of the largest big data frameworks such as Apache Spark and Databricks (now valued at $6.2 billion). And Conviva was one of the original developers of Apache Spark.
With this round of funding, Anyscale is planning to build out its first commercial products. It is unknown what these commercial products will be, but once it is released it will have the ability to scale computing projects from one laptop to a cluster of machines. The product is expected to launch next year. Anyscale is also planning to continue growing the Ray open source project.
“Right now we are focused on making Ray a standard for building applications,” said Stoica in an interview via TechCrunch. “The company will build tools and a runtime platform for Ray. So, if you want to run a Ray application securely and with high performance then you will use our product.”
Intel’s participation in this funding round was strategic as it also uses Ray for its big data projects.
“Intel IT has been leveraging Ray to scale Python workloads with minimal code modifications,” added Moty Fania, principal engineer and chief technology officer for Intel IT’s Enterprise and Platform Group. “With the implementation into Intel’s manufacturing and testing processes, we have found that Ray helps increase the speed and scale of our hyperparameter selection techniques and auto modeling processes used for creating personalized chip tests. For us, this has resulted in reduced costs, additional capacity and improved quality.”
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) co-founder Ben Horowitz had also previously invested in Databricks so the venture firm also jumped on this opportunity.
“I worked on Databricks with Ion and that’s how it started,” added Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz in a TechCrunch interview. “With Ray it was a very attractive project because of the open-source metrics but also because of the issue it addresses,” he said.
