Algorithmia Lands $25M Series B

Norwest Venture Partners led the Series B with participation from Madrona, Gradient Ventures, Work-Bench, Osage University Partners and Rakuten Ventures. Rama Sekhar, a partner at Norwest, has joined Algorithmia's board of directors.

"Productionizing machine learning models manually was a serious challenge before we found Algorithmia. The AI Layer gave us the tech stack to smoothly deploy and manage our machine learning lifecycle and their team goes above and beyond to ensure that our efforts are successful"

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Algorithmia, whose AI Layer platform automates DevOps for ML applications, is targeting enterprises and government agencies that are ready to deploy ML at scale. The AI Layer is already being used by the United Nations, multiple US intelligence agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and over 90,000 engineers and data scientists.

"Productionizing machine learning models manually was a serious challenge before we found Algorithmia. The AI Layer gave us the tech stack to smoothly deploy and manage our machine learning lifecycle and their team goes above and beyond to ensure that our efforts are successful," said Michael Fischer, Chief of Innovation, MS&AD a Toyota affiliated company.

Despite the optimism around AI, adoption is being slowed by manual IT infrastructure management tasks. An Algorithmia survey of 500 data scientists in 2018 found that 75% of their time is spent deploying, connecting, scaling and managing ML models manually. AI Layer solves this problem by automating the ML DevOps lifecycle, allowing data scientists and ML teams to collaborate and manage their portfolios of models. Data scientists gain efficiency and can focus on building models rather than managing infrastructure.

"Machine Learning requires a very different infrastructure and lifecycle than traditional software," said Diego Oppenheimer, CEO of Algorithmia. "This investment allows us to continue to be laser-focused empowering them to deploy and iterate their models at full speed."

Algorithmia, which raised a $10.5 million Series A in 2017, will use the new capital for product development, engineering talent, sales, marketing, and international expansion. Algorithmia's growth over the past two years, coupled with the size of the global AI market – $4 trillion by 2022, according to Gartner – prompted the latest investment.

"AI is creating a fundamental shift in technology that is as big, if not bigger than mobile and cloud," said Rama Sekhar, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "Every Fortune 500 CIO has an AI initiative but they are bogged down by the difficulty of managing and deploying ML models. Algorithmia is the clear leader in building the tools to manage the complete machine learning lifecycle and helping customers unlock value from their R&D investments. We're thrilled to lead this investment and back the incredible team at Algorithmia."

About Algorithmia

Algorithmia is the leader in Machine Learning deployment and management. Its AI Layer deploys and manages models in large enterprises and government agencies worldwide. Nearly 90,000 engineers and data scientists are deploying models on the AI Layer. For more information, visit www.algorithmia.com.

About Norwest Venture Partners

Norwest is a premier multi-stage investment firm managing more than $7.5 billion in capital. Since inception, Norwest has funded 600+ companies and currently partners with more than 140 active companies across its venture and growth equity portfolio. The firm invests in early to late stage businesses across a wide range of sectors with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. The Norwest team offers a deep network of connections, operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders scale their businesses. The firm has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, with subsidiaries in India and Israel. For more information, please visit www.nvp.com. Follow Norwest on Twitter @NorwestVP.