Union.ai, a company specializing in enabling organizations to create scalable AI and data products, has announced the release of Union Cloud for customers in North America and Europe, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Union Cloud aims to empower businesses to deliver high-quality and impactful products that leverage cutting-edge AI technologies, all while maintaining low costs, high quality, and rapid deployment.
In conjunction with this launch, the company has successfully raised $19.1 million in Series A financing from NEA and Nava Ventures to support its expansion and enhanced offerings.
During recent quarters, Union AI has collaborated with its customer partners utilizing Union Cloud to address challenges that hinder the delivery of high-quality AI products. The success of their open-source workflow orchestration platform, Flyte, has contributed to the company’s accelerated momentum. With the introduction of Union Cloud as a managed solution powered by Flyte, an increasing number of customers are expressing enthusiasm.
The utilization of machine learning and large language models raises concerns surrounding privacy and information security, with companies becoming increasingly cautious about relinquishing control over their data. Greg Papadopoulos, venture partner at NEA, expressed excitement about the progress made by the Union.AI team, particularly with Flyte and Union Cloud, as it enables companies to leverage the power of large language models while maintaining control and ownership of their data. This aspect serves as a real differentiator and addresses the demands of the market.
Manish Patel, founder of Nava Ventures, highlighted the importance of time to value in today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape. Companies without extensive internal developer resources run the risk of falling behind, making the ability to participate and compete crucial. Patel expressed excitement about investing in Union.AI and collaborating closely with CEO Ketan Umare and the team to extend the capabilities of Flyte through Union Cloud. This expansion will enable more companies to swiftly transition from research to production.
Numerous well-known brands and startups, including Spotify, Stripe, Gojek, Wolt, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter, have already adopted Flyte. Users have reported significant increases in productivity, thanks to Flyte’s automatic versioning of data and AI pipelines, ensuring auditability, reliability, reproducibility, and scalability.
Mick Jermsurawong, a machine learning infrastructure engineer at Stripe, shared that Flyte’s efficiencies have resulted in measurable business outcomes, with 10 times more offline training jobs dispatched and 5 times more frequent model releases. Similarly, Katrina Palen, a staff ML platform engineer at Stash, highlighted the impact of Flyte on their ML workflows, noting a two times faster provision time, three times faster model execution, and at least three times lower costs.
Flyte’s features, such as automatic provisioning of data and ML systems, help reduce compute costs by launching infrastructure only when necessary and utilizing cheaper Spot instances reliably through built-in caching and smart checkpointing architecture.
With the introduction of Union Cloud, Union.ai aims to empower data and AI teams of any size, allowing them to compete without the burden of infrastructure and ensuring data ownership and governance. Union Cloud is a transformative technology platform that streamlines complex tasks, such as developing production pipelines for advanced perception and language modeling, enabling autonomous driving capabilities, facilitating breakthroughs in drug discovery and operational research, and engineering novel molecules.
The user-friendly approach of Union Cloud reduces complexity, lowers overall compute costs, and provides complete observability for data and AI workflows, even on a task level.
Union.ai’s Series A funding of $19.1 million will support the company’s growth and expanded offerings, allowing more organizations to benefit from Union Cloud’s simplified AI and data workflows.
