Welcoming Pachyderm to the M12 portfolio

M12 - Microsoft’s Venture Fund
m12vc
Published in
2 min readAug 19, 2020

--

By Nagraj Kashyap

I’m excited to welcome Pachyderm — a data science platform that combines Data Lineage with End-to-End Pipelines on Kubernetes — to the M12 portfolio.

Despite the growing number of applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the tool sets used to execute data science projects largely have not kept pace. Machine learning workflows are time-intensive to deploy and oftentimes hard to maintain. Even the best implementations lack important structural features like data versioning or data provenance. The explosion of data and a growing interest in using AI to inform business decisions will only exacerbate these problems over time.

Pachyderm is tackling the data tangle head on, enabling users to track the lineage of data and machine learning models, better collaborate, and gain deep insights into how machine learning models and associated data inputs and outputs have changed over time — an important milestone in the pursuit of explainable AI. Machine learning pipelines built with Pachyderm make data and results more accessible to its customers without sacrificing functionality, security, or evolving compliance with AI legal standards. To top things off, their container infrastructure and flexible workflow management allows scalability at each pipeline stage.

The team behind the tech — co-founders Joe Doliner and Joey Zwicker — have demonstrated incredible drive in building Pachyderm. Their work has solicited impressive customer feedback, and they’ve attracted a strong roster of investors of which we’re proud to join the ranks. JD and Joey have experience building open source products for the developer community; they’ve created Pachyderm evangelists amongst the thousands of data scientists and engineers using the product as a result of quick iterations in response to customer requests. The general availability of their latest product, Pachyderm: Hub, is another great response to evolving customer needs: enterprise teams will be able to get a Pachyderm cluster on-demand without taking on the burden of infrastructure management.

Whether you’re a Chief Data Scientist at a Fortune 50 company or a “citizen data scientist” analyzing open data sets, Pachyderm provides important rigor around data and pipeline management.

As the prevalence of data continues to skyrocket, we’re excited to be in the ring with Pachyderm — enabling explainability, repeatability, and scalability to the growing community of data scientists in the enterprise. Congratulations to JD, Joey, and the team on your Series B raise!

For more M12 news, follow us on Twitter.

--

--

M12 - Microsoft’s Venture Fund
m12vc
Editor for

M12 empowers entrepreneurs through investments, insight, and unparalleled access to Microsoft. https://m12.vc/