Veteran AI Experts Launch Weights & Biases to Offer State of the Art Developer Tools for Machine Learning

W&B announces $5 million Series A from Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta to revolutionize performance tools for machine learning developers


SAN FRANCISCO, May 31, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Weights & Biases (W&B) launched today with the first enterprise AI platform to help teams visualize and debug machine learning models.

W&B received $5 million in a Series A investment round co-led by Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. The company was founded by AI experts and former Figure Eight (previously CrowdFlower) co-founders Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, as well as former Google engineering leader and yCombinator alum Shawn Lewis. Biewald will join the company’s board of directors, along with Trinity Ventures general partner Daniel Scholnick. Scholnick also sits on the boards of Docker and New Relic, two highly valued companies serving the developer ecosystem.

The W&B platform creates a standardized way for teams to track machine learning model development, understand their models’ performance, and develop in a collaborative environment. As companies deploy machine learning models in increasingly mission-critical domains like medicine and autonomous vehicles, mistakes become riskier, and best-in-class software development practices become essential.

“We have worked extensively with companies to turn machine learning research projects into scalable, real-world deployments,” says Lukas Biewald. “We’ve watched hundreds of teams struggle to deploy machine learning models successfully, and the same problems show up repeatedly. Machine learning has created a fundamentally new kind of programming, requiring a fundamentally new set of developer tools. We created Weights & Biases to provide that missing toolkit.”

“Artificial Intelligence has so much potential, but few companies are implementing it yet because the development process is too complicated for all but a small number of highly trained engineers. W&B aims to dramatically streamline the machine learning software development process so that AI benefits can be unlocked across industries and no longer restricted to the few firms able to hire extremely skilled and extraordinarily expensive AI developers today,” says Trinity Ventures general partner Daniel Scholnick. “W&B’s all-star team of machine learning visionaries is uniquely suited to transition AI from research projects to standard business practices within the enterprise.”

About Weights & Biases
AI will fuel the next technology revolution. Weights & Biases will enable it. Created by serial entrepreneurs with enterprise machine learning experience, Weights & Biases (W&B) provides the first enterprise AI platform to help teams visualize and debug machine learning models so that AI implementations can become accessible, reliable and scalable within the enterprise. W&B founders Lukas Biewald and Christopher Van Pelt previously co-founded and led CrowdFlower, now Figure Eight, the leading Human-in-the-Loop AI platform for machine learning teams, and co-founder Shawn Lewis is a former Google senior software engineer. The company is backed by leading venture capital firms Trinity Ventures and Blomberg Beta. Learn more at www.wandb.com

About Trinity Ventures
Trinity Ventures is a top-tier venture capital firm combining business insight, practical expertise and a personal touch to help start-ups win big. For over thirty years, Trinity has helped passionate entrepreneurs with breakthrough ideas transform markets and lives. Trinity's investment team takes a collaborative approach and believes in personal engagement, mutual respect and goal alignment to deliver outsized returns to entrepreneurs and investors. The firm invests in early stage technology companies with emphases on Cloud Infrastructure and Core Technologies, Consumer Driven Services, Horizontal Business Applications, Industry Specific Services and Emerging Technologies. For more information, visit www.trinityventures.com.

Editorial Contact:
Marisa Lam
GMK Communications
marisa@gmkcommunications.com