- OctoML announced it raised $3.9 million in a seed round of funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Amplify Partners
OctoML announced it raised $3.9 million in a seed round of funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Amplify Partners. With this funding round, the company is going to bring the ability to deploy deep learning models on every hardware configuration to companies across the globe.
And OctoML is leveraging the power and traction of Apache TVM — an open-source project launched by the founding team — to enable companies of every size to harness the power of deep learning without the expensive heavy lifting of tuning and securing models to each hardware configuration that a customer might need.
Apache TVM is an automated deep learning model optimization and compilation stack that powers efficient model deployment in major technology companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Xilinx, and Qualcomm. And it is backed by a thriving community of more 270 contributors worldwide from major tech companies and academic institutions. The goal of the project is to enable data engineers to easily optimize and deploy models across a broad set of hardware in a portable manner.
“It has been awesome to see the community take off around Apache TVM. It is clear that researchers and large tech companies see both the utility and value it can offer in pushing the state of the art in efficiency machine learning in research and production settings,” said OctoML co-founder and CEO Luis Ceze. “The promise of Apache TVM is so high that hardware companies are actively looking to optimize for it and companies with lean teams need solutions to not only deploy these models but keep them up and running. That is the opportunity that OctoML is pursuing. OctoML’s automated model optimization technology leveraging TVM, leads to lower engineering and operating costs for customers, and lowers the risk of dependence on specific platforms.”
OctoML is going to offer a managed service for companies looking to securely deploy in multi-cloud and edge environments and ensure that the models stay up and running at peak efficiency.
“Intelligent applications are changing the landscape of software – and in fact blending again the roles of software and hardware. The work that the OctoML team has done to build this technology into a powerhouse in the open-source community is outstanding and we are excited to back this team,” added Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group.
Why is OctoML utilizing Apache TVM? Deploying deep learning models efficiently is a challenge since there is a fast-growing set of model architectures and operations that need to be mapped to a fast-growing set of hardware targets like CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and a multitude of specialized hardware accelerators. And optimizing models for hardware targets today is typically done manually, a laborious but profitable process that can yield orders of magnitude gains in terms of better performance and energy efficiency. Apache TVM is able to address this problem using machine learning to automate ML code generation and optimization.
“Apache TVM’s machine-learning based approach to optimizing machine learning systems fundamentally enables targeting a constantly changing and expanding set of hardware targets such as data centers, cars, phones, health devices and embedded systems with much less engineering,” explained Tianqi Chen, co-founder and CTO of OctoML.
OctoML is being led by Ceze, Knight, Chen, Thierry Moreau, and Jared Roesch. They came together around their work on TVM after they recognized a need in the industry for a solution to enable easy, efficient, and secure deployment of deep learning models. And OctoML counts Carlos Guestrin as an advisor — who is a recognized machine learning leader at the Allen School and in his role as director of AI and Machine Learning at Apple.
“OctoML is taking several steps further in automation and is ramping up work with hardware vendors to optimize the TVM stack for their current and upcoming chips,” commented Jason Knight, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of OctoML and former Head of Software Product – AI Products Group at Intel.
OctoML is a spinout from the University of Washington Allen School for Computer Science and Engineering.
