Weights & Biases Raises Its Series C at a Billion Dollar Valuation
Funding From New Investors Felicis Ventures and BOND as well as Existing Investors Insight Partners and Coatue Supports Investment in W&B's Best-in-Class MLOps Platform and Continued Enterprise Adoption
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Weights & Biases, the leading developer-first MLOps platform, today announced the close of its Series C funding round of more than $100 million at a one billion dollar 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."
The team at W&B has more than doubled in size in 2021 and leadership plans to invest in scaling not just their product but also their global team. Recently, they brought on Yan-David Erlich, General Partner at Coatue as Chief Operating Officer and Seann Gardiner, who held executive roles at DataRobot, Alteryx and ThoughtSpot, to lead partnerships and business development.
"We are excited to back Weights & Biases for the third consecutive round," said David Cahn, Partner at Coatue. "We believe that machine learning in Enterprise is reaching an inflection point and that W&B can be a core workflow engine for practitioners. W&B's pace of product development and sales execution has impressed us and with this new round, we look forward to supporting their continued growth and goal of being the leading platform in this category. "
Weights & Biases remains committed to building the best end-to-end MLOps platform in the world and will spend 2022 and beyond investing in their product, building the features and solutions their customers need most, and scaling with the demand of an ever-growing market of machine learning practitioners around the world.
About Weights & Biases
Weights & Biases is the leading developer-first MLOps platform to build better models faster. Used by top researchers including teams at Qualcomm, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Lyft, Pfizer, Toyota, Github, and MILA, W&B is part of the new standard of best practices for machine learning.
About Felicis
Founded in 2006, Felicis Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. Felicis focuses on early stage investments and currently manages over $2.1B in capital across 8 funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 41 companies valued at $1B+. More than 91 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen (IPO), Credit Karma (acq by Intuit), Cruise (acq by General Motors), Fitbit (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Meraki (acq by Cisco), Ring (acq by Amazon), and Shopify (IPO). The firm is based in Menlo Park, CA. Learn more at www.felicis.com.
About BOND
BOND is a global technology investment firm that supports visionary founders throughout their entire life cycle of innovation and growth. BOND's founding partners have backed industry pioneers such as Airbnb, Canva, Docusign, DoorDash, Facebook, Instacart, JD.com, Peloton, Plaid, Ring, Slack, Spotify, Square, Stripe, Twitter, Uber, and Waze.
About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight Partners has invested in more than 400 companies worldwide and has raised through a series of funds more than $30 billion in capital commitments. Insight's mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Across its people and its portfolio, Insight encourages a culture around a belief that ScaleUp companies and growth create opportunity for all. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.
About Coatue
Coatue is one of the largest technology investment platforms in the world with more than $45 billion in assets under management. Our dedicated team of engineers and data scientists work closely with investment professionals to add value to founders and executive teams in our portfolio. With venture, growth and public funds, we back entrepreneurs from around the globe and at every stage of growth. Some of our private investments have included Airtable, Ant Financial, Anaplan, ByteDance, Chime, Databricks, DoorDash, Instacart, Meituan, Snap, Snowflake and Spotify.
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