Seattle-based machine learning startup OctoML has raised an $85 million Series C round.
The funding, announced Monday, follows the company's $28 million Series B in March. With the money, OctoML plans to expand its platform and grow its network of partners.
Tiger Global Management led the round, while Addition, Madrona Venture Group and Amplify Partners all participated.
“The ever-growing ecosystem of ML hardware backends and diverse models are generating an insurmountable amount of manual work to optimize and fine tune models before deployment. This is resulting in skyrocketing costs, significant delays in time to production and impeding new use cases in resource-constrained edge devices,” Luis Ceze, CEO and co-founder of OctoML, said in a news release.
OctoML began through research at the University of Washington about five years ago before incorporating in 2019. The company's technology is meant to improve its clients' machine learning models. OctoML automates the processes involved in getting a model ready to deploy. Ceze has been a professor at UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering since 2007, but he said in March he is on sabbatical as he works to grow OctoML.
OctoML's product is currently in early access. At the time of the Series B, Ceze said the goal was to have its product generally available by year's end.
With the $85 million Series C, OctoML is the latest company to receive backing from the New York City-based Tiger Global Management. The investment firm has backed some of the Seattle area's fastest-growing companies, including Amperity, Karat and Highspot, all of which are now worth at least $1 billion.
“OctoML is creating a profound shift in the way organizations build next-generation AI models and applications,'' John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global, said in a news release. “We’re excited to welcome Luis and the co-founding team at OctoML to the Tiger portfolio and look forward to playing a role in their next growth chapter.”
