Weights & Biases raises $45M for its machine learning tools

Published February 1, 2021

Weights & Biases, a startup building tools for machine learning practitioners, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series B funding.

The company was founded by Lukas Biewald, Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis — Biewald and Van Pelt previously founded CrowdFlower/Figure Eight (acquired by Appen). Weights & Biases says it now has more than 70,000 users at more than 200 enterprises.

Biewald (whom I’ve known since college) argued that while machine learning practitioners are often compared to software developers, “they’re more like scientists in some ways than engineers.” It’s a process that involves numerous experiments, and Weights & Biases’ core product allows practitioners to track those experiments, while the company also offers tools around data set versioning, model evaluation and pipeline management.

“If you have a model that’s controlling a self-driving car and the car crashes, you really want to know what happened,” Biewald said. “If you built that model years ago and you’ve run all these experiments since then, it can be hard to systematically trace through what happened” unless you’re using experiment tracking.

He described the startup as “an early leader” in this market, and as competing tools emerge, he said it’s also differentiated because it is “completely focused on the ML practitioner” rather than top-down enterprise sales. Similarly, he said that as machine learning has been adopted more widely, Weights & Biases is occasionally confronted by a “high-class problem.”

Image Credits: Weights & Biases

“We’re not interested in selling to companies that are doing machine learning for machine learning’s sake,” Biewald said. “With some companies, there’s a mandate from the CEO to sprinkle some machine learning in the company. That’s just really depressing to me, to not have any impact. But I would actually say the vast majority of companies that we talk to really do something useful.”

For example, he said agriculture giant John Deere is using the startup’s platform to continually improve the way it uses robotics to spray fertilizer, rather than pesticides, to kill weeds and pests. And there are pharmaceutical companies using the platform for how they model how different molecules will behave.

Weights & Biases previously raised $20 million in funding. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Coatue, Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta. Insight’s George Mathew is joining the board of directors.

“I’ve never seen a MLOps category leader with such a high NPS and deep customer focus as Weights and Biases,” Mathew said in a statement. “It’s an honor to make my first investment at Insight to serve an ML practitioner user-base that grew 60x these last two years.”

The startup says it will use the funding to continue hiring in engineering, growth, sales and customer success.

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Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together

Published March 10, 2019

Appen just announced that it’s acquiring Figure Eight in an all-cash deal that sees Appen paying $175 million upfront, with an additional payment of up to $125 million based on Figure Eight’s performance this year.

Both companies focus on using crowdsourced labor pools to annotate data, which in turn is used to train artificial intelligence and machine learning — for example, Figure Eight (formerly known as CrowdFlower and Dolores Labs) says its technology has been for everything from mapping to stock photography to scanning receipts for expense reports.

Appen, meanwhile, is a publicly-traded company headquartered in Sydney. CEO Mark Brayan described its technology — and its “crowd” of more than 1 million remote workers — as “highly complementary” to Figure Eight, which he praised for its data annotation and self-serve capabilities.

“We know that to compete and to be able to deliver even higher volumes, we need a richer set of technologies,” Brayan said. “That’s where Figure Eight comes in. They are, in our view, the leader in the market of the platform providers.”

As for what this means for the Figure Eight team, he said, “Everybody stays in place,” and that Appen plans to continue investing in the product.

Brayan also noted that Appen previously acquired another data annotation company called Leapforce in 2017, a move that he said provided the company with greater scale.

“The Figure Eight acquisition is the next step of our evolution,” he said. “Step one was to get bigger, step two is to become much more tech forward, which is what we get with Figure Eight.”

San Francisco-based Figure Eight has raised a total of $58 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Trinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, Canvas Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. As CrowdFlower, it launched on-stage at the TechCrunch50 conference nearly a decade ago.

“I’m extremely proud of the team,” said Figure Eight co-founder Lukas Biewald in a statement. “This is a genuine validation of everything we’ve achieved and a great platform for our teams to combine and continue to do amazing things in AI.”

Biewald (a college friend of mine), along with his co-founder Chris Van Pelt, has moved on to a new startup called Weights and Biases, but he remains involved in Figure Eight as chairman. You can watch their TC50 presentation here.