Weights & Biases, a prominent end-to-end MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) platform, has successfully closed a strategic investment round of $50 million, valuing the company at $1.25 billion. The funding round was led by Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, as well as existing investors including Coatue, Insight Partners, Felicis, BOND, and BloombergBeta.
With the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs), Weights & Biases has been continuously expanding its MLOps platform to cater to the needs of advanced machine learning research. The newly acquired funds will be used to further develop these tools, including the introduction of a new offering called Weights & Biases Prompts.
W&B Prompts is designed to empower LLM builders to comprehensively understand their programs, enabling fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and debugging of the latest foundational models. This capability is pivotal in achieving faster time-to-production for LLM models and the applications they drive. W&B Prompts, like many of the platform’s features, was developed in collaboration with partners and customers to ensure alignment with the evolving needs of the practitioner community.
Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who led the investment round, highlighted Weights & Biases’ role in the industry’s evolution from model training supervision to prompting, thereby enabling the safe and reliable use of LLM platforms by enterprises worldwide.
Weights & Biases has been gaining significant traction as a crucial tool for LLM and MLOps, experiencing substantial user growth since its Series C funding round in 2021. Its user base has expanded from 100,000 to over 700,000 users, including major players in the generative AI model space such as Meta, OpenAI, MosaicML, Aleph Alpha, HuggingFace, and more. The platform has tracked nearly 300 million hours of machine learning experiments for a diverse range of customers, from industry giants like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Toyota Research Institute, Volkswagen, and Square to emerging players like Cohere.
Lukas Biewald, CEO and Co-Founder of Weights & Biases, emphasized the company’s commitment to providing top-tier tools for machine learning practitioners. He expressed excitement about the support from Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, both of whom have been active users of the platform.
Weights & Biases is seamlessly integrated into 20,000 repositories, including those for LLM projects like Langchain, LlamaIndex, and GPT4All, as well as infrastructure providers like Coreweave, Lambda, and Graphcore. The company’s partnerships extend to leading entities in the industry, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, AWS, GCP, Anyscale, and Snowflake. Weights & Biases is also widely referenced in cutting-edge research papers and serves as a valuable resource for academics pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities.
Casber Wang, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, acknowledged Weights & Biases’ position as a prominent MLOps platform catering to the thriving wave of innovation in machine learning development. The partnership between Sapphire Ventures and Weights & Biases is anticipated to contribute to the platform’s continued growth and success.
