Arize AI has secured funding of $38 million. The startup will use this money to expand its machine learning operations platform for the enterprise.
Arize AI, a company providing a platform for machine learning operations, revealed today that it has secured $38 million in a Series B round headed by TCV and joined by Battery Ventures and Foundation Capital.
CEO Jason Lopatecki said the fresh funds will be used to develop R&D and increase the company’s 50-person staff over the next year, bringing Arize’s total capital raised to $62 million.
MLOps, or machine learning operations, is the process of installing and maintaining machine learning models in production. MLOps, like DevOps, aspires to improve automation while enhancing production model quality — but not at the expense of business and regulatory requirements. Given the enterprise’s interest in machine learning and AI in general, it’s no wonder that MLOps is expected to be a major industry, with IDC estimating a $700 million market by 2025.
Arize was launched in 2019 by Lopatecki and Aparna Dhinakaran, following the sale of Lopatecki’s previous firm, TubeMogul, to Adobe for around $550 million.
Dhinakaran and Lopatecki initially met at TubeMogul, where Dhinakaran worked as a data scientist before joining Uber to work on machine learning infrastructure. “We came to the conclusion that something was fundamentally lacking after witnessing team after team — year after year — fail to comprehend both what was wrong with models brought into production and struggle to understand what models were doing once deployed,” Lopatecki added. If the future is AI-driven, then software to assist people comprehend AI, break down problems, and solve them is required. AI is not viable without machine learning observability.”
Arize is far from the first to take on these kind of data science difficulties. Tecton, another MLOps vendor, has secured $100 million to expand its machine learning model testing platform. Other companies in the field include Galileo, Modular, Gantry, and Grid.ai, which raised $40 million in June to establish a gallery of AI components for apps.
