Data Science Scaling Company Coiled Raises $5 Million

By Noah Long • Oct 1, 2020
  • Coiled — a modern solution for seamlessly scaling data science, machine learning, and AI in Python — announced that it has raised $5 million

Coiled — a modern solution for seamlessly scaling data science, machine learning, and AI in Python — announced that it has raised $5 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Costanoa Ventures and IA Ventures. Other backers include Kaggle co-founders Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner, and Techammer (spearheaded by Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher).

Coiled also has a reputable leadership team including CEO and Founder Matthew Rocklin — who is best known for creating Dask — as well as Hugo Bowne-Anderson and Rami Chowdhury — both of whom are long-time leaders in the open-source community.

Dask has become the leading Python way to natively scale out open-source technology such as logisticians at Walmart tracking products through stores, biologists at the Harvard Medical School and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative studying human disease, and banks like Capital One managing credit risk.

However, up to now the open-source software ecosystem did not provide the tools for enterprises to do Dask work in a secure and collaborative way. This is why Rocklin started Coiled: to enable existing Python workflows for data science and machine learning to scale in a way that works better for enterprises.

Coiled’s initial product will enable data scientists to distribute workloads between cloud and on-premise clusters without having to involve devops teams. And it will enable data teams to better share workflows.

KEY QUOTES:

“As data science goes from prototyping to production, it’s crucial to be able to scale workloads. Dask (and Coiled) allow data scientists to scale using workloads using the libraries they know and love. That’s why I’m excited to be an investor in Coiled.”

-Anthony Goldbloom, CEO and Cofounder of Kaggle

“I’m excited to see the Dask community growing with Coiled building products around this essential scaling technology. I was so proud to be associated with the creation of Dask at Anaconda that arose from our broad efforts to scale the PyData community. At Quansight and OpenTeams, we look forward to partnering with Coiled to ensure Dask continues to grow as a trusted backbone for scaling data science and machine learning workflows.”

-Travis Oliphant, Creator of SciPy, NumPy, and Numba

“The Coiled team are world experts in scaling Python and are deeply aware of the pain points data scientists face everyday. It has been a pleasure collaborating with Matt and Dask developers in recent years in our work on Apache Arrow, and we’re excited for what’s up next for this open source ecosystem.”

-Wes McKinney, creator of Pandas and Apache Arrow

“There is a huge gap between tools that data scientists love and those that are fit for the enterprise. Coiled brings these two together and will be the crucial connective tissue that enables organizations to do productive data science at scale.”

-Tony Liu, Senior Associate at Costanoa Ventures

“It’s rare to get the caliber team that founded the original open source project to lead it’s commercialization for enterprises. Matt Rocklin knows exactly what needs to be done and has the credibility with the PyData community to make Coiled a great company.”

-Greg Sands, Managing Partner at Costanoa Ventures

“When Matt originally developed Dask as an open-source project, his vision was to enable every data scientist to scale their python code. Today, it is relied on by tens of thousands of users globally. Coiled builds on this framework to provide a complete solution for individuals and enterprises alike to simply and seamlessly scale their machine learning code and data from local workstations to data centers, traditional clouds, and even GPU clusters. Coiled’s rapid ascent is impressive and we at IA are thrilled to be partnering with the team on this journey.”

-Brad Gillespie, General Partner , IA Ventures