Work-Bench Blog — Announcing Our Investment in Algorithmia
Enabling Companies of All Sizes to Centralize, Reuse, and Productionize Data Science
We’re excited to announce that Work-Bench is joining Google’s new fund focused on AI and machine learning investments, Madrona, Rakuten Ventures & Osage University Partners to invest in Algorithmia’s $10.5M Series A.
To the outside world, data science can look like a lot of razzle and dazzle. But at an enterprise grade and scale, it requires an inordinate amount of work to truly get a model into production. From siloed data sets and strict data governance policies, to a lack of central repositories for machine learning models in an organization, there’s no way to manage the full lifecycle of algorithm development — let alone the infrastructure to quickly and efficiently deploy and host compute intensive AI models. What’s needed is a seamless platform to build and deploy machine learning models — a Github and Heroku for AI development at the Fortune 1000.
Enter Algorithmia. The company’s mission is to make state of the art algorithms accessible and discoverable. They’ve built a public marketplace and common API for algorithms, functions, and models that run as scalable microservices, allowing anyone to leverage the latest in AI research from top universities and add a layer of intelligence to existing applications.
What really excites us though is the quality and strength of their enterprise platform, CODEX, which drew strong praise from technologists in our corporate network. Built using the underlying tech which powers Algorithmia’s marketplace, CODEX serves as a discoverable repository for both internal and external models and libraries across teams and technology stacks. It makes any data science model available as a production ready microservice that can be easily deployed on premise or any major cloud. Point blank, this is a game changer. Collaboration and NoOps deployment, battle hardened with security, management and monitoring features, is no easy feat but necessary for enterprises striving to automate and digitize its businesses.
Diego Oppenheimer (Algorithmia’s CEO) and Kenny Daniel (their CTO) first met while at Carnegie Mellon when they were both undergraduates. Prior to Algorithmia, Diego spent 6 years at Microsoft as an Engineering Program Manager for Excel’s Business Intelligence team. Kenny continued onwards with graduate research in Artificial Intelligence and Mechanism Design, publishing multiple algorithms and papers in machine learning. Algorithmia actually started as an algorithm optimization competition, where the winner’s work was turned into an API that anybody could call for a price. This led to the marketplace and then, the enterprise platform that allows companies to centralize, reuse and deploy their models at scale.
We first met the company at Strata, where they won the Startup Showcase in Fall 2015. Since then, they’ve not only continued to add algorithms and users to its marketplace, but also leveraged their learnings to create a powerful platform for the enterprise. This resonated strongly with several of our corporate partners that learned more about Algorithmia’s offering through our Executive Briefing Program. As we dug in, it became clear that they had not only built the first of its kind marketplace, but they had built out the ideal collaboration and infrastructureless deployment platform that makes it easier to rapidly spin up, experiment with, and productionize AI and ML algorithms — keys to success that even the most forward thinking organizations struggle with.
It’s clear that machine learning and AI will be increasingly critical for business going forward, and we believe every application will become an intelligent application that will impact every single line of business. Algorithmia offers a simple yet powerful way to start this journey and we are so excited to support Diego and Kenny as they help organizations of all sizes build intelligent applications.
See more coverage of the announcement in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Wired, and whether you’re a developer or Fortune 1000, make sure to give Algorithmia a try to bring state of the art algorithms into your company.
