SAN FRANCISCO — Weights & Biases, operator of a developer-first MLOps platform, has closed a Series C funding round of more than $100 million giving the company a $1 billion valuation, from new investors Felicis Ventures and BOND as well as existing investors Insight Partners and Coatue.
Weights & Biases (W&B) provides a best-in-class developer-first MLOps platform to more than 100,000 machine learning engineers and data scientists across the globe. Founded by repeat entrepreneurs Lukas Biewald, Shawn Lewis, and Chris Van Pelt, W&B began as an experiment tracking solution and quickly expanded to other areas of the machine learning pipeline, including dataset versioning, model evaluation, data visualization, collaborative model training, reproducibility and pipeline management. W&B is trusted by cutting-edge research organizations including OpenAI and Toyota Research Institute as well as category-leading companies like NVIDIA, Facebook Research, Graphcore, Pandora, and hundreds more who are on the forefront of commercializing the application of machine learning (ML).
“Our ultimate goal is to make machine learning work in the real world with a platform that ML engineers love,” said Lukas Biewald. “That means solving pain points in every production machine learning workflow, encouraging best practices and helping teams work together more effectively. This funding allows us to continue building out our platform, adding new and better functionality, and scaling with the growing needs of the ML community.”
As workflows become more complex and machine learning continues to enjoy widespread adoption, W&B is in an ideal position to scale and adapt in tandem with the community, providing the solutions practitioners and teams need to push state-of-the-art models into production more quickly and more confidently.
“It’s rare to see a company that has both explosive bottoms-up adoption and incredible enterprise customers as partners,” said Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis Ventures. “It’s impressive to see a major NVIDIA commercial partnership one day, followed by an academic mention in Nature the next. Weights & Biases does an exceptional job supporting the next generation of ML practitioners, whether in academia, research organizations, or in industry. They are poised to be a de facto component in the pipelines of the next big breakthroughs in machine learning.”
“To say that W&B’s MLOps platform is impressive is a massive understatement,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “As machine learning continues to be rapidly adopted and leveraged globally by ML practitioners and data scientists, the need for better collaboration on models is increasingly apparent. W&B exceeds this need with its category-leading platform focused on hyper-parameter tuning and experiment tracking. Insight is thrilled to continue our partnership with W&B with this reinvestment and we look forward to powering the team through this exciting next phase of their ScaleUp journey.”
“Weights & Biases solves a mission-critical pain point for machine learning practitioners,” said BOND partner Jay Simons. “By helping users better track, iterate and share model experiments, W&B has not only addressed this point, but created a wedge to expand into additional product categories.”
“For us, Weights & Biases was a game changer,” said Heinrich Küttler, a Research Engineer at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). “No other MLOps tool available allows for rapid iteration of AI experiments with the same ease of sharing results, annotating interesting behavior and long-term storage of logging data. When any issues arose, we found the support team at Weights & Biases to be quick and helpful!”
“Weights and Biases moved the AI field from traditionally babysitting a single experiment to managing multiple experiments across many teams spanning entire companies”, said Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI. “Collaboration and sharing of scientific insights and results are central tenets of AI today, and only grows more prevalent each day. We are limited as individuals, and can only overcome this weakness together. Thank you W&B for making us work together.”
