Less than a year after its $28 million Series B, Seattle-based OctoML is back with another round of funding. This time, the company raised $85 million in a Series C round led by Tiger Global Management. Existing investors Addition, Madrona Venture Group and Amplify Partners also participated in the Series C round, bringing OctoML’s total funding raised to $132 million.
OctoML has built a machine learning deployment platform for organizations that are looking to integrate machine learning into their applications. While machine learning has potential to optimize software across all sorts of industries, it’s quite complicated to build a machine learning model that actually makes it into production. OctoML helps make that effort a lot easier. Its platform can deploy machine learning models across hardware platforms, cloud providers or edge devices, and helps organizations make sure they’re getting the most out of their machine learning applications.
OctoML says it has a number of Global 100 companies as customers. By leveraging its platform, OctoML says it’s able to give its customers a 2-10x boost in performance, which means 2-10x savings in computing costs.
In addition to counting numerous major tech companies as customers, it has also signed a handful on as partners. OctoML recently announced that it partnered with Qualcomm, Arm and AMD to provide hardware support for its machine learning platform. This hardware support is important for OctoML and its customers, because machine learning can often be hardware-intensive to run.
“The ever-growing ecosystem of ML hardware backends and diverse models are generating an insurmountable amount of manual work to optimize and fine tune models before deployment. This is resulting in skyrocketing costs, significant delays in time to production and impeding new use cases in resource-constrained edge devices. These challenges are threatening the progress of AI by limiting its accessibility; it’s also putting ML on a path that is not environmentally sustainable,” OctoML CEO Luis Ceze said in a statement.
He continued, “Our ecosystem efforts are driven by our vision for the company, which is to make ML accessible to as many developers, anywhere and on any device—in order to drive an incredible diversity of innovation.”
When OctoML announced its Series B round, it revealed its plans to double its team. The company has made significant progress on that front, growing from around 45 employees to about 75, according to the company’s LinkedIn page. But its hiring push isn’t over yet, as the company is now recruiting for 20-plus open positions.
This new funding will help OctoML grow. The company also revealed that it plans to use the funding to invest in expanding its platform capabilities, and partnering with new hardware and cloud service providers.
“OctoML is creating a profound shift in the way organizations build next-generation AI models and applications,” John Curtius of Tiger Global said in a statement. “OctoML’s vision of delivering a unified deployment lifecycle for users across all the ML hardware vendors they rely on is making ML development more cost-effective and accessible to a broader set of developers. We’re excited to welcome Luis and the co-founding team at OctoML to the Tiger portfolio, and look forward to playing a role in their next growth chapter.”
