OpenPipe – a company that enables developers to create their own application-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) – announced the closing of a $6.7 million seed round. This funding round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and prominent angel investors, including Logan Kilpatrick (former head of developer relations at OpenAI), Alex Graveley (creator of GitHub Copilot), and Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub). This funding round will scale the team and accelerate the product.
OpenPipe’s central insight is that smaller models can match or exceed the performance of much larger ones when specialized to a specific task. This specialization is done with fine-tuning, which improves response quality and correctness. However, many developers cannot perform this task because of the complex workflow required. The existing tools are designed for engineers with specialized knowledge and skills in machine learning, which limits teams and organizations without a dedicated specialist.
OpenPipe offers an easy-to-use tool that enables everyday developers to train and deploy fine-tuned models faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater accuracy. It can be integrated into a customer’s existing codebase to collect their existing prompts, which are then used as training data for fine-tuning a smaller, more specialized model. Then, developers can use the fine-tuned model as a drop-in replacement for their existing prompts.
OpenPipe’s customer base includes startups and enterprises that use fine-tuned models for performing critical business workflows, such as translating and extracting information from government regulations, categorizing and filtering YouTube videos based on transcripts, or routing inbound customer service requests to the appropriate teams. OpenPipe has saved customers over $3 million in inference costs since late last year.
Based in Seattle, the company was founded by brothers Kyle Corbitt and David Corbitt, who both sharpened their skills at top tech companies, including Google, Palantir and Qualtrics. Kyle also headed Y Combinator’s Startup School team serving over 100,000 startup founders worldwide. The company is also partnered with several industry leaders to provide fine-tuning like Langfuse and Athina AI for data collection, and OctoAI and Fireworks AI to serve the completed models.
KEY QUOTES:
“The biggest challenge we see for developers deploying LLM applications today is going from proof of concept to usage at scale. OpenPipe enables teams to easily convert their prompts into production-ready fine-tuned models. These fine-tuned models allow developers to deliver a much snappier user experience at a much lower price point, without sacrificing quality.”
- Kyle Corbitt, co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe
“OpenPipe is paving the way for greater accessibility and usability of large language models. This investment underscores our belief in the profound impact OpenPipe will have in enhancing the productivity of developer teams and their ability to launch competitive go-to-market applications faster and with more precision.”
- Tony Liu, Partner at Costanoa Ventures
