Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm dedicated to the proposition that one entrepreneur's idea, with the right support, can become a business that changes the world. The company is made up of former entrepreneurs who set out to create the firm they wanted as founders. This forward-thinking team of VCs has helped companies like Lending Club change the way money is lent and borrowed, Sunrun reinvent the residential clean energy market, and Netflix revolutionizes media distribution and consumption, among many others. Foundation Capital is currently invested in more than 60 high-growth ventures in the areas of consumer, information technology, software, digital energy, financial technology, and marketing technology. These investments include AdRoll, Beepi, Bolt Threads, DogVacay, Kik, ForgeRock, Lending Home, Localytics, and Visier. The firm's twenty-six IPOs include Lending Club, OnDeck, Chegg, Sunrun, MobileIron, Control4, TubeMogul, Envestnet, Financial Engines, Netflix, NetZero, Responsys and Silver Spring Networks.

Foundation Capital

Amplify Partners invests in technical founders solving technical problems for the enterprise. They invest in early-stage companies pioneering novel applications in machine intelligence and computer science.

Amplify Partners

Costanoa Ventures leads Formation, Seed, and Series A stage investments in companies that change the way the world does business.

Costanoa Ventures

‍Greenoaks makes concentrated, long-term investments in generational teams building enduring companies. The firm invests behind exceptional leaders early in their journeys, building partnerships that endure for decades.

Greenoaks

Outerbounds

Outerbounds provides human-centric infrastructure for ML and data science teams based on Metaflow, an open-source framework Outerbounds' founders started at Netflix. Today, Metaflow and Outerbounds are used by hundreds of leading ML and data science organizations across industries to power a diverse set of ML applications, from state-of-the-art LLMs to business-oriented data science.

Outerbounds offers a platform that provides infrastructure for ML, AI, and data projects. It is built on top of the open-source framework Metaflow and is designed to enable the design, development, and deployment of ML, AI, and data science applications, including GenAI.

The toolkit to build machine learning applications at scale

Machine Learning Infrastructure

Outerbounds Showcases Transformative ML/AI Use Cases Across Industries with New Platform Features

Outerbounds offers a platform that provides infrastructure for ML, AI, and data projects. It is built on top of the open-source framework Metaflow and is designed to enable the design, development, and deployment of ML, AI, and data science applications, including GenAI.In addition, the platform supports cloud workstations and provides access to GPU resources. It is also SOC2-compliant and integrates with data warehouses and lakes, such as Snowflake and Databricks, to automatically train ML models on data.&nbsp;The company operates a B2B model that includes a free tier.Key customers and partnershipsThe company’s notable customers include Trade Republic, Netflix, Convoy, Carsales, CNN, Dyson, Wadhwani AI, and Adobe.Funding and financialsOuterbounds’ latest funding round was in December 2021, when it raised USD 18.5 million in a Series A round. The round saw participation from a consortium of investors including Costanoa Ventures and Foundation Capital.

Datagen provides a self-service synthetic data platform that generates visual synthetic data of humans for computer vision applications. The platform allows users to write their own code to generate labeled synthetic data for faces, full body, and humans in motion in the form of images and videos to test and train AI models while retaining complete control over the data. The data covers a range of computer vision tasks including face landmark detection, face and hair segmentation, facial recognition and identification, full body pose estimation, full body segmentation, and behavior detection.Key customers and partnershipsThe company serves three of the top five global technology companies and Fortune 500 companies across the automotive, smart fitness, AR/VR/metaverse, smart office, and home security industries. Its notable customers include Google, Toyota, NVIDIA, IBM, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn March 2022, the company raised USD 50 million in a Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. The funds were utilized to bolster its position in the market.Datagen reported to have recorded 8x growth in revenue in 2022.

Datagen

Weights &amp; Biases offers a platform that allows users to build models with experiment tracking, data set and model versioning, data visualization, hyperparameter optimization, and model management. The platform enables users to automatically retrain and re-evaluate models and centrally manage all model versions through every lifecycle stage—from development to staging to production. It also helps to visualize comparisons between model versions to evaluate performance and identify regressions before model deployment. It also offers toolkits such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19172">W&amp;B Weave and W&amp;B Production Monitoring </a>to build and monitor data- and ML-powered applications, respectively, through interactive visualizations.The company also offers a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/17880">suite of tools (W&amp;B Prompts) </a>to support large language model operations (LLMOps). W&amp;B Prompts includes tools and features for experiment tracking, debugging, and collaboration, as well as a one-click method to evaluate and score prompts through the OpenAI Eval’s framework.The company provides the platform through a free tier and under a subscription model for up to USD 50 per user per month.Key customers and partnershipsWeights &amp; Biases served more than 700,000 ML practitioners as of August 2023. Its notable include NVIDIA, Toyota, BMW Group, Samsung, Fujifilm, Truebill, and Clear Capital.The company has <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18663">partnered with Lambda </a>, a GPU cloud computing provider, to offer its MLOps platform integrated with the infrastructure services of the latter, catering to enterprises dealing with AI and deep-learning workloads.Funding and financialsIn August 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/20874">USD 50 million in a strategic investment </a>round at a valuation of USD 1.25 billion, led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. The round also saw participation from Sapphire Ventures, Coatue, Insight Partners, and other investors. The company aimed to utilize the fresh funds to further develop its ML tools, including the launch of W&amp;B Prompts.

Weights & Biases

BentoML offers an open-source platform called Bento Cloud, for the deployment and scaling of AI applications. It is a fully managed platform that handles the complexities of AI infrastructure, providing serverless autoscaling as required during the development and production stages. The platform helps to ship models to production with advanced deployment options including online and shadow A/B testing, while also providing visibility through model performance monitoring. The platform integrates with an organization’s existing data stack and enables users to continuously deploy and improve models in production. The company offers its platform through a combination of subscription and usage-based model.In addition, BentoML also provides the following open-source platforms: 1) Yatai, for model deployment on Kubernetes and 2) bentoctl, for model deployment on any cloud platform.Key customers and partnershipsAs of January 2024, BentoML reported that over 1,000 organizations, comprising more than 3,000 members, use its platform. Its notable customers include Koo, Open Layer, Line, and Naver.The company entered into a strategic partnership with TomTom, a developer of location technology, to help integrate with various models as well as in LLM deployments.Funding and financialsThe company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19684">USD 9 million in seed funding </a>in June 2023 led by DCM Ventures, with participation from Bow Capital. It aimed to channel the newly acquired funds to enhance its platform and offer developers a range of tools for building, deploying, and scaling AI applications efficiently.

BentoML

Iguazio provides a serverless platform based on its open-source Nuclio framework that helps users to develop, deploy, and manage real-time AI applications without requiring them to manually manage underlying infrastructures such as servers and storage. The platform creates real-time intelligence for applications located at the edge, public cloud, and on-premise data centers and reduces bandwidth constraints by consolidating data into a repository and making it available for applications as required. The platform can ingest and transform data from any source, which is then used to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor models in production.The company leverages Big Data and ML software such as Apache Spark, TensorFlow, and Kubernetes to manage software containers that enable applications to run across different computing environments.Key customers and partnershipsIguazio serves customers in the financial services, telecommunications, smart mobility, manufacturing, retail, AdTech, gaming, healthcare, energy, and utilities sectors. Notable customers include Samsung, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, Google, and Intel.Funding and financialsIn January 2020, the company raised USD 24 million in a funding round led by INCapital Ventures. The funds were utilized to accelerate its growth, expand its reach into new global markets, grow sales, and facilitate new sales channels that include companies such as Dell Technologies

Iguazio

Cogito Tech provides image and video annotation to generate computer vision training data sets for ML &amp; deep learning (DL). The video annotation solution leverages AI-powered tools to convert video into a sequence of images and generates training data sets for ML-based AI models, including self-driving cars and drones. The AI model understands and derives insights from visual data to detect, identify, classify, and track objects in an image or video. Cogito also provides virtual assistants and chatbots to help users in the process of training ML algorithms. Cogito Tech also provides high-quality, ethically sourced datasets that are compliant and reliable to train ML models.In addition, the company provides services to fine-tune LLMs and GenAI applications through reinforcement learning techniques as well as stress test models through red teaming.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the company served more than 150 customers across 25 countries in the retail, medical, automotive, agriculture, robotics, smart cities, security, and manufacturing industries. Notable customers includes Verizon Media, The University of Sydney, National Geographic, Tumblr, and Vimeo.

Cogito Tech

Platforms and frameworks that help developers build and train ML models.

Platforms that deploy and host the trained and tested models in production and integrate them into applications through APIs.

Platforms that generate artificial data that mimics the characteristics of real data, which is then used to train ML models at scale.

Platforms that help monitor and manage ML models in training and deployment to track performance, conduct variance analysis, and optimize performance.

Makers of hardware such as CPUs, GPUs, and other application-specific hardware required to train and run ML workloads.

Integrated solutions that handle the end-to-end processes of developing, training, deploying, and monitoring ML models.

Data exchange providers and platforms that offer data labeling services via manual and/or software methods, which are used as input to train ML models.

Includes companies that provide infrastructure to build AI/ML applications

Provides tools to build, monitor, and deploy GenAI applications

Industry is focused on offering platforms for other businesses to build AI-/ML-powered apps

Empowering Tomorrow's Innovations with Generative AI Infrastructure

Generative AI Infrastructure

PROMINENT_CATEGORY

<div>
 <ul>
 <li>Outerbounds has expanded Metaflow, its ML infrastructure stack, enabling it to handle large-scale AI tasks effectively. Integrating Ray, a distributed computing framework, enhances Metaflow's compute capabilities, making it accessible and cost-effective for businesses of all sizes.</li>
 <li>The enhanced Metaflow by Outerbounds offers developers affordable access to extensive computing power, including GPUs from AWS, GCP, Azure, and CoreWeave.&nbsp;</li>
 <li>&nbsp;This enhancement enables organizations to develop unique, customer-centric AI-powered product experiences, addressing the challenges faced by companies customizing foundation models like GPT.</li>
 </ul>
</div>

Outerbounds

About EDGE

Contact Us

Resources

Area of Focus

Technology Research Made Effortless