Rubber Ducky Labs – a company focused on making recommender systems easier to build and imbue with human knowledge – recently announced a $1.5 million seed investment round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Cadenza Ventures and angel investors including Brad Klingenberg (ex-Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix), Patrick Hayes (co-founder of SigOpt), and Dave Aronchick (co-founder of Bacalhau and Expanso). Rubber Ducky Labs completed Y Combinator in Winter 2023.
Recommender systems are known as being the heart of many e-commerce and content discovery products, ensuring the customer sees the products that they’re most likely to purchase. And these systems are unique within machine learning because they directly drive revenue, but they do not fit nicely into existing machine learning toolchains.
By setting up a paved path for analyzing and iterating on recommender systems, Rubber Ducky Labs gives teams the answers they’re looking for in minutes instead of days. And data-driven insights are built into the product, enabling teams to explore data visually, inclusive of product images, and drill down into metrics on individual items or Users.
Rubber Ducky Labs was launched in 2022 by Alexandra Johnson, an engineer with a background in fashion at Polyvore and then a machine learning-focused developer at SigOpt. Johnson holds two patents in ML tooling and holds a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Her co-founder Georgia Hong is CTO of Rubber Ducky Labs. Hong’s background includes infrastructure work at Meta, Datadog, SigOpt and Cockroach Labs.
KEY QUOTES:
“Your recommender system can make you a lot of money, or get you into a lot of trouble, so you want to pay close attention to it. We’re the building tools to let you do that.”
— Rubber Ducky Labs co-founder & CEO Alexandra Johnson
“We’re thrilled to be working with Alexandra and Georgia to solve the problem of recommender systems teams getting bogged down building their own monitoring and operations toolchain because general-purpose ML tools don’t meet their specific demands. Rec sys teams deserve a platform like Rubber Ducky Labs to focus more on core algorithm development and less on operations and analytics tooling.”
— Bain Capital Ventures partner Slater Stich
