SAN FRANCISCO, April 28, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 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(1).
“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."
Additional Resources
- Read Mike Del Balso’s “Tecton: The Data Platform for Machine Learning” blog
- Read Kevin Stumpf’s “Why We Need DevOps for Machine Learning Data” blog
- Read Martin Casado’s “Investing in Tecton” blog
- Read Matt Miller’s “The Data Driven Enterprise: Our Investment Thesis in Tecton” blog
About Tecton.ai
Tecton.ai’s mission is to make world-class machine learning accessible to every company. Tecton enables data scientists to turn raw data into production-ready features, the predictive signals that feed machine learning models. The founders created the Uber Michelangelo machine learning platform, and the team has extensive experience building data systems for industry leaders like Google, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber. Tecton.ai is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in New York. For more information, visit https://www.tecton.ai or follow @tectonAI.
(1) May 2019 survey by Dimensional Research, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Projects Are Obstructed by Data Issues. Global Survey of Data Scientists, AI Experts and Stakeholders.”
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