Union.ai – a company that extends companies’ ability to create next-generation AI and data products at scale – announced recently the general availability of Union Cloud for North American and European customers of AWS and GCP. Union Cloud enables organizations to deliver highly reliable and impactful products that leverage the latest AI technologies at low cost, high quality, and rapid velocity. Plus the company also announced it has raised $19.1 million in Series A financing from NEA and Nava Ventures in order to fuel growth and its expanded offerings.
Over the past few quarters, Union AI has been working with its Union Cloud customer partners to solve problems that impede delivering high-quality AI products. And organizations that adopted Flyte include hundreds of well-known brands and startups, including Spotify, Stripe, Gojek, Wolt, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter. And users report Flyte dramatically increases productivity by automatically versioning data and AI pipelines, making them auditable, reliable, reproducible, and infinitely scalable.
Flyte was built for efficiency with features like automatic provisioning of data and ML systems, which help reduce compute costs.
Union Cloud – Machine Learning Engineered and Delivered Seamlessly
— Union Cloud delivers all the power and capabilities of Flyte orchestration to companies that don’t want to =invest in building and maintaining their own infrastructures.
— For an end-to-end view of even the most complex pipelines, Union Cloud provides engineering and production teams state-of-the-art task-level observability and gives group leaders the ability to measure ROI for individual projects.
— Data scientists, researchers, and production engineers can run highly efficient workloads without installing or maintaining Kubernetes clusters for their AI and data pipelines.
— Union Cloud offers role-based access control (RBAC) and fine-grained authorization, guaranteeing security and flexibility.
— Union Cloud is secure. And it’s deployed in your VPC, so you control access to your data.
— Union Cloud is SOC 2 Type II compliant.
Union Cloud is a transformative technology platform that empowers organizations to carry out a broad range of sophisticated tasks without the need for extensive infrastructure or dedicated Kubernetes teams. And this enables organizations to focus on their core objectives, fostering innovation across various domains. These tasks include (but are not limited to) developing production pipelines for advanced perception and language modeling, enabling autonomous driving capabilities, facilitating breakthroughs in drug discovery, engineering novel molecules, and refining operational research strategies.
The beauty of Union Cloud is that it provides a streamlined, user-friendly approach, and reducing the complexity typically associated with such processes. And more importantly, Union Cloud can lower overall compute costs dramatically while offering complete observability for data and AI workflows — even on a task level.
Union Cloud is immediately available for AWS and GCP and starts at $2,500 per month. And Union offers free trials for qualified users.
KEY QUOTES:
“During this period we learned about problems like observability, governance and infrastructure maintenance that impede realization of value from AI. Our accelerated momentum reflects on the success of Flyte, the popular open-source workflow orchestration platform, and we are seeing an even broader range of customers expressing excitement about Union Cloud as a new managed solution that is powered by Flyte.”
“Rather than running expensive GPU clusters constantly, Flyte launches infrastructure when needed and tears it down when idle. Additionally, its built-in caching and smart checkpointing architecture enables data and ML teams to use cheaper Spot instances reliably.”
— Union AI CEO Ketan Umare
“Machine learning, and especially large language models, raise big issues around privacy and information security. Companies are becoming increasingly wary of using services where they lose control over what precisely happens with their data. Combining the power of big models with rich company data has to be handled with care — that’s one of the reasons why we’re so excited about the progress made by the Union.AI team, first with Flyte and now with Union Cloud. This is exactly what people are demanding and a real differentiator: Let me exploit the power of large language models while maintaining control and ownership of my data.”
— Greg Papadopoulos, venture partner, NEA
“The AI landscape is evolving quickly, and companies that do not have significant internal developer resources run the risk of falling behind. To be able to participate let alone compete in today’s rapidly changing AI powered product landscape, time to value is of the essence. That’s why we are excited to invest in and work closely with Ketan Umare and the Union.AI team as they extend the power of Flyte even further through Union Cloud, allowing many more companies to quickly go from research to production.”
— Manish Patel, founder, Nava Ventures
“Based on a single team, we see 10x more offline training jobs dispatched from Flyte, and that results in 5x more frequent model releases with sizable business gains,” Jermsurawong said. “I think the realization here is that ML productivity is not a nice to have but actually a business requirement.”
— Mick Jermsurawong – a machine learning infrastructure engineer with Stripe
“Our provision time is at least two times faster on average. Model execution is three times faster, and the cost — which we can actually probably further optimize with minimal configuration and optimization — is at least three times cheaper.”
— Katrina Palen, a staff ML platform engineer at Stash
