Experiment Tracking Platform Company Weights and Biases Raises $45 Million

By Dan Anderson ● Feb 16, 2021
  • Weights and Biases — an Experiment Tracking platform that is transforming how teams build and collaborate on Machine Learning (ML) models and operations (MLOps) — announced that it has raised a $45 million Series B investment. These are the details.

Weights and Biases — an Experiment Tracking platform that is transforming how teams build and collaborate on Machine Learning (ML) models and operations (MLOps) — announced that it has raised a $45 million Series B investment round led by Insight Partners with continued support from Coatue, Trinity Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta. And as part of the round, George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners, joins the Weights and Biases Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Weights and Biases (W&B) was founded by Lukas Biewald, Shawn Lewis, and Chris Van Pelt in 2018 to improve AI reproducibility and safety by making high quality developer tools for ML practitioners. First used by forward-thinking machine learning teams at Open AI, Toyota Research, and Salesforce Research, the company has grown to over 70,000 users at 200+ enterprises and institutions in the past three years.

This latest funding round enables W&B to broaden its MLOps mandate and customer base from Experiment Tracking to Dataset Versioning, Model Evaluation, and Pipeline Management. And as part of this expansion, W&B is scaling up its team and currently hiring for roles in engineering, growth, sales, and customer success.

Tom Preston-Werner (founder of Github) invested along with Insight Partners joining Pieter Abbeel, Nat Friedman, Jeff Hammerbacher, and Richard Socher as individual W&B investors.

KEY QUOTES:

“Machine learning has suddenly gone from a research topic to scaled-out MLOps for a large number of global enterprises. Software developers have high quality tools for every part of their workflow, but ML practitioners are still in the dark ages. You can’t have AI safety if ML teams can’t systematically track the models they build and the datasets they use. This funding allows us to expand the category leading products for ML practitioners that we are known for.”

— Weights and Biases CEO Lukas Biewald

“I’ve never seen a MLOps category leader with such a high NPS and deep customer focus as Weights and Biases. It’s an honor to make my first investment at Insight to serve an ML practitioner user-base that grew 60x these last two years.”

— George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners