Hoping to make life easier for AI developers

Silicon valley MLOps startup Iterative.ai has raised $20m for tools that help streamline the workflows for data scientists and machine learning engineers.

The round was led by 468 Capital and Florian Leibert, the founder of Mesosphere (open source data center management). Existing investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated, bringing the startup's total funding to more than $25m.

This week, Iterative also launched its first commercial product, DVC Studio – a dashboard for using its flagship open source projects, Data Version Control (DVC) and Continuous Machine Learning (CML).

Work smarter while working on smarter systems

By relying on open source tools, Iterative hopes to serve as a counter to the proprietary (or nominally open, but highly controlled) machine learning toolsets proffered by cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google.

Iterative argues that the AI industry should integrate machine learning workflows into current practices for software development, like CI/CD.

"Data, ML, and AI are becoming an essential part of the industry and IT infrastructure,” Leibert, general partner at 468 Capital, said. “Companies with great open source adoption and bottom-up market strategy, like Iterative, are going to define the standards for AI tools and processes around building ML models."

The startup's projects are used by more than 1,000 companies; DVC and CML are backed by more than 200 code contributors. Iterative launched major updates to its two projects in April, and said that it hoped to speed up development with the new investment round.

“DVC Studio enables machine learning developers to run hundreds of experiments with full transparency, giving other developers in the organization the ability to collaborate fully in the process,” CEO Dmitry Petrov said.

“The funding today will help us bring more innovative products and services into our ecosystem.”

The MLOps market is growing rapidly, with rivals including Molecula, Domino Data Lab, Iguazio, and Verta looking to profit off of standardizing fragmented workflows.