Today Tecton.ai emerged
from stealth and formally launched with its data platform for machine learning.
Tecton enables data scientists to turn raw data into production-ready features,
the predictive signals that feed machine learning models. Tecton is in private
beta with paying customers, including a Fortune 50 company.
Today Tecton.ai also announced $25 million in
seed and Series A funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Both
Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Matt Miller, partner
at Sequoia, have joined the board.
Tecton.ai founders Mike Del Balso (CEO),
Kevin Stumpf (CTO) and Jeremy Hermann (VP of Engineering) worked together at
Uber when the company was struggling to build and deploy new machine learning
models, so they created Uber's Michelangelo
machine learning platform. Michelangelo was instrumental in
scaling Uber's operations to thousands of production models serving millions of
transactions per second in just a few years, and today it supports a myriad of
use cases ranging from generating marketplace forecasts, calculating ETAs and
automating fraud detection.
Del Balso, Stumpf and Hermann went on to
found Tecton.ai to solve the data challenges that are the biggest impediment to
deploying machine learning in the enterprise today. Enterprises are already
generating vast amounts of data, but the problem is how to harness and refine
this data into predictive signals that power machine learning models.
Engineering teams end up spending the majority of their time building bespoke
data pipelines for each new project. These custom pipelines are complex,
brittle, expensive and often redundant. The end result is that 78% of new
projects never get deployed, and 96% of projects encounter challenges with data
quality and quantity.
"Data problems all too often cause last-mile
delivery issues for machine learning projects," said Mike Del Balso, Tecton.ai
co-founder and CEO. "With Tecton, there is no last mile. We created Tecton to
empower data science teams to take control of their data and focus on building
models, not pipelines. With Tecton, organizations can deliver impact with
machine learning quickly, reliably and at scale."
Tecton.ai has assembled a world-class
engineering team that has deep experience building machine learning
infrastructure for industry leaders such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber.
Tecton is the industry's first data platform that has been designed
specifically to support the requirements of operational machine learning. It
empowers data scientists to build great features, serve them to production
quickly and reliably and do it at scale.
Tecton makes the delivery of machine learning
data predictable for every company.
Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen
Horowitz, said: "The ability to manage data and extract insights from it
is catalyzing the next wave of business transformation. The Tecton team has
been on the forefront of this change with a long history of machine learning/AI
and data at Google, Facebook and Airbnb and building the machine learning
platform at Uber. We're very excited to be partnering with Mike, Kevin, Jeremy
and the Tecton team to bring this expertise to the rest of the industry."
Matt Miller, partner
at Sequoia, said: "The founders of Tecton built a platform within Uber
that took machine learning from a bespoke research effort to the core of how
the company operated day-to-day. They started Tecton to democratize machine
learning across the enterprise. We believe their platform for machine learning
will drive a cambrian explosion within their customers, empowering them to
drive their business operations with this powerful technology paradigm,
unlocking countless opportunities. We were thrilled to partner with Tecton
along with a16z at the seed and now again at the Series A. We believe Tecton
has the potential to be one of the most transformational enterprise companies
of this decade."